"The truth is that Mr. Baldwin is doing a very remarkable work. He is restoring the whole quality and tone of British politics. In abeyance during the war, political life suffered a serious lowering of standard in the insidious and pervasive influence of Mr. Lloyd George. Superb as he was in a crisis, Mr. Lloyd George's purely political methods were tainted. Mr. Baldwin has brought into public life a pleasant savour, freshness and health. It is the fragrance of the fields, the flavour of apple and filbert and hazel hut, all the unpretentious, simple, wholesome, homely but essential qualities, suggestions, traditions of England, that Mr. Baldwin has substituted for the over-charged, heavy-laden decadent atmosphere of post-war days. He has shown the nation...that, in the modern world, there is a place and an essential place for the stedfast, disinterested, self-reliant and modest qualities of the English gentleman... In his shrewd and deep simplicity of character, his patience, his passion for the community and for its welfare, his refusal to treat his fellow-countrymen as enemies, perhaps, too, in an occasional gaucheness, a tendency to expose himself gratuitously to the almost contemptuous criticism of persons of a more complete "trade finish," and, most certainly, in an essential loneliness of spirit, however well hidden under a quizzical and cheerful companionableness, it is Abraham Lincoln whom Mr. Baldwin recalls. And, further, like Lincoln, Mr. Baldwin, it is clear, has that rarest and finest of all the qualities of a leader—the power of liberating and calling in aid the deeper moral motives that lie in the hearts of men."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAcademics from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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'A Back-Bench Conservative', The Times (12 August 1925), p. 7
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stanley_Baldwin
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Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley KG PC (3 August 1867 – 14 December 1947) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on three separate occasions (1923–24, 1924–29 and 1935–37).
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