Mr. Herod, whose death has just been announced by a telegram from Lyons, was one of the most striking and forceful personalities of our time.

By birth he was a Syrian Jew, suffering from the prejudice attaching to such an origin, and apparently with little prospect of achieving the great place which he did achieve in the eager life of our generation.

But his indomitable energy and his vast comprehension of men permitted him before the close of his long and useful life to impress himself upon his contemporaries as very few even of the greatest have done.

Our late beloved sovereign, Tiberius, perhaps the keenest judge of men in the whole Empire, is said to have remarked one evening in the smoking-room to his guests, when Herod had[Pg 321] but recently left the apartment: "Gentlemen, that man is the corner-stone of my Eastern policy," and the tone in which His Majesty expressed this opinion was, we may be sure, that not only of considered judgment, but of equally considered reverence and praise.

It is a striking testimony to Mr. Herod's character that while he was still quite unknown (save, of course, as the heir of his father) he mastered the Greek and Latin tongues, and we find in his diary the shrewd remark that as the first was necessary to culture, so was the second to statesmanship.

It would have been impossible to choose a more difficult moment than that in which the then unknown Oriental lad was entrusted by the Imperial Government with the task which he has so triumphantly accomplished. The Levant, as our readers know, presents problems of peculiar difficulty, and though we can hardly doubt that the free and democratic genius of our country would at last have solved them, we owe it to the memory of this remarkable personality that[Pg 322] the solution of them should have been so triumphantly successful.

We will not here recapitulate the obscure and often petty intrigues which have combined to give the politics of Judæa and its neighbourhood a character of anarchy. It is enough to point out that when Mr. Herod was first entrusted with his mission the gravest doubts were entertained as to whether the cause of order could prevail. The finances of the province were in chaos, and that detestable masquerade of enthusiasm to which the Levantines are so deplorably addicted, especially on their "religious" side, had baffled every attempt to re-establish order.

Mr. Herod's father (to whom it will be remembered the Empire had entrusted the beginnings of this difficult business), though undoubtedly a great man, had incurred the hatred of all the worst and too powerful forces of disorder in the district. His stern sense of justice and his unflinching resolution in one of the last affairs of his life, when he had promulgated his[Pg 323] epoch-making edict to regulate the infantile death-rate—a scientific measure grossly misunderstood and unfortunately resented by the populace—had left a peculiarly difficult inheritance to the son. The women of the lower classes (as is nearly always the case in these social reforms) proved the chief obstacle, and legends of the most fantastic character were—and still are—current in the slums of Tiberias with regard to Mr. Herod Senior. When, some years later, he was struggling with a painful disease which it needed al............