"[I]t was Stanley Baldwin...who personified the spirit of the age to a greater degree than any other man. So well indeed did he focus the aspirations of his countrymen and reflect them back that the epoch seemed to take its character from him, as the Victorian age had from Queen Victoria... As a man and as prime minister, Baldwin was patient, slow-moving, whimsical, blessed with a fine sense of humour; ruminative; shrewd and wise within his limits. He never drove his colleagues; a kindly man, he was, as he himself admitted, a bad butcher... His kindliness and gentleness also made it impossible for him to ruthlessly attack his political opponents... Baldwin, believing as he did that considerateness was "the central English virtue", hated strife, shrank from conflict, constantly sought to heal division and bitterness, whether in his own cabinets, the country or the world. In this too he personified the deepest feelings of his countrymen. His speeches seldom manifested combative argument; instead they evoked moods; he was a Delius or a Debussy among political speakers. And the favourite mood was one of a sunset calm and nostalgia, in which the British nation, like an old couple in retirement enjoying the peaceful ending of the day, contemplated some sweep of English landscape and hearkened to the distant church bells. Nothing could have been more congenial to the contemporary British temperament than this tranquillity, in which desperate problems or dangers could be put out of mind, and energetic, possibly painful, action shirked or put off; nothing could have been more welcome to his hearers than this evocation of all things kindly, gentle and decent... Baldwin, Victorian that he was, saw politics – even international politics – as he saw the whole of human life, in terms of religion; of, in his own words, "doing secular acts from a spiritual motive". He believed that it "is precisely these values of right and wrong, of good and evil, of honesty and courage, which matter supremely for religion and national life...moral values, eternal in their quality, transient in their form and application, are the foundation of a country's greatness..." ... Such were the rulers and such was the nation to which befell after the Great War the task of preserving the power of England."