"1st Viscount" Richard Haldane Hand Signed Note Dated 1924 For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "1st Viscount" Richard Haldane Hand Signed Note on embossed Letterhead From The House of Lords Dated 1924. 

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Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st 30 July 1856 – 19 August 1928) was an influential

British Liberal and philosopher. He was Secretary of State for War between

1905 and 1912 during which time the "Haldane Reforms" of the British Army were implemented.

Raised to the peerage as Viscount Haldane in 1911, he was Lord Chancellor between 1912 and 1915, when he was forced

to resign because of false allegations of German sympathies. He later joined

the Labour Party and once again served as Lord Chancellor in 1924 in the first

ever Labour administration. Apart from his legal and political careers, Haldane

was also an influential writer on philosophy, in recognition of which he was

elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1914. Haldane was born at 17 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, the son of Robert Haldane and his

wife Mary Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson. He was the grandson

of the Scottish evangelist James Alexander Haldane,

the brother of respiratory physiologist John Scott Haldane, Sir William Haldane and author Elizabeth Haldane, and the uncle of J. B. S. Haldane and Naomi Mitchison. He received his first education at the Edinburgh Academy, and then at the University of Göttingen.

He gained a first and MA at University of Edinburgh where he received first-class

honours in Philosophy and as Gray scholar and Ferguson scholar in philosophy of

the four Scottish Universities. After studying law in London, he was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn, in 1879, and became a successful lawyer. He

was taken on at 5 New Square Chambers by Lord Davey in 1882 as

the junior. Haldane's practice was a specialism in conveyancing; a particular skill for pleadings at appeal and

tribunal cases, bringing cases to the privy council and house of Lords. By 1890

he had become a Queen's Counsel. By 1905 he was earning £20,000 per

annum at the Bar[3] (equivalent to $2,100,000 in 2018).

He became a bencher at Lincoln's Inn in 1893. Amongst his early

friends was Edmund Gosse, the

scholarly librarian at the inn's law library, whose help made Haldane well

known for being fully prepared in court and parliamentary briefs. Haldane was a

deep thinker, an unusual breed: a philosopher-politician. During his stay at

Göttingen he expanded an interest in the German philosophers, Schopenauer and

Hegel. He had refused a place at Balliol, but in nodding respect for the Master

and philosopher, T H Green, he dedicated

his Schopenauer translation The World as Will and Idea which

he carried through with a friend, Peter Hume Brown, the Scottish historian. As early as January

1906 Haldane was persuaded by fellow Liberal Imperialist Edward Grey to begin

planning for a Continental war in support of the French against the Germans.[b] However, Haldane's first estimates

reduced the Army by 16,600 men and reduced expenditure by £2.6m to

£28 million, as the Liberals had been elected on a platform of

retrenchment. By 1914 Britain spent 3.4% of

national income on defence, little more in absolute terms than

Austria-Hungary's 6.1%. Army expenditure was determined according to a formula

devised by the Esher Committee. In 1900, during the Boer War, army expenditure was £86.8m, by 1910 (a low point,

after four years of cuts under the Liberals) it had dropped to £27.6m and by

1914 it had risen back to £29.4m. In March 1914 effective expenditure on the

Army, after allowing for increased pensions and £1m set aside for military

aviation, was still less than in 1907-8, and £2m less than in 1905-6 (despite a

20% rise in prices since then)In October 1907 Haldane was intimately involved

with the negotiations at Windsor with Kaiser Wilhelm. The Germanophile and

linguist was thrilled to be summoned at 1 am to talk with the Emperor on

arms reduction principles over whisky. But the import was the Baghdad-Berlin

railway which Germany was hoping to construct with British approval. A fluent

German-speaker, Haldane was lulled into a false sense of security believing

'like a bear with a sore head' that he had won a great deal. Another such

conference took place at Balmoral in September 1909. The Kaiser arrogantly

insisted that only the King was of equal rank. Despite the budgetary

constraints, Haldane implemented a wide-ranging set of reforms of the Army,

aimed at preparing the army for an Imperial

war but with the more likely (and secret) task of a European war. The main

element of this was the establishment of the British

Expeditionary Force of six infantry divisions and one cavalry

division. The Official Historian Brigadier Edmonds

later wrote that "in every respect the Expeditionary Force of 1914 was

incomparably the best trained, best organised and best equipped British Army

ever to leave these shores"