Bywater was president of the Oxford Aristotelian Society from its inception in the early ’eighties until his leaving Oxford in 1908. The society met in his rooms weekly during term, and it is stated that in twenty-five years he did not miss half a dozen meetings. The procedure was to construe and discuss, chapter by chapter, one of the more important writings of the Philosopher. The knowledge and the methods which the society inculcated in its members had a far-reaching influence upon philosophical studies in Oxford.
In University politics Bywater was a ‘liberal’ and a reformer. To national and international affairs his attitude was sceptical; his prejudices were conservative—‘the vulgar radicalism of my youth’ was his own phrase—but he had no illusions. He had learned much from the Germans, and had done much to introduce German scientific methods into English scholarship; but in later years he recognized and deplored the growing chauvinism which prevented even the best of the Germans from admitting that they could learn anything from an English book.
Bywater was a prince of bibliophiles; for there was nothing about a book that he did not know, and no kind of value that he did not appraise. For this reason the collection which he bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, and which there bears his name, is much more than a collection of rare and beautiful books. It is, as he himself wrote, ‘a conspectus in its limited way of the literature of learning from the age of Bessarion to that of the 'Επίγονοι of Sealiger and Casaubon’; and it is also a real part of the work of a great humanist. In his London home, surrounded by these books, Bywater was most himself. ‘It was there,’ writes one of the most devoted of his younger friends, ‘that he was a great teacher. It was not merely that he was a master of his subject—and of one’s own; but one felt powerfully the stimulus of a temperament from which what may be called the casual impurities of intellectual life—pedantry, hurry, irrelevance, pretentiousness, cleverness—had been purged away.’
[Memoir by W. W. Jackson, 1917, reissued with addenda, 1919 (to the bibliography add the inaugural lecture of 1894, published 1919); personal knowledge.]
CADOGAN, GEORGE HENRY, fifth Earl Cadogan (1840-1915), statesman, was, born at Durham 9 May 1840. He was the eldest son of Henry Charles, fourth Earl, by his wife, Mary, daughter of Gerald Valerian Wellesley, prebendary of Durham and brother of the first Duke of Wellington. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and as a young man accompanied the Prince of Wales on various tours at home and abroad. At the general election of 1868, as Viscount Chelsea, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Bury, in the conservative interest. He was elected for Bath in 1873, but in the same year went to the House of Lords in consequence of his father’s death. Disraeli made him under-secretary of state for war in 1875, and under-secretary for the Colonies in 1878. During the second Salisbury administration (1886-1892) he was lord privy seal, and responsible for Irish business in the House of Lords. In the session of 1887 he introduced the Irish Land Act of that year, and in April he joined the Cabinet. He was at this time the trusted adviser of Queen Victoria in regard to her domestic affairs. For his political and other services he received the Garter in July 1891.
When the third Salisbury administration was formed (June 1895) Lord Cadogan became lord-lieutenant of Ireland with a seat in the Cabinet. He was warmly interested in Mr. Gerald Balfour’s Land Act of 1896, and pressed the Treasury until he obtained more liberal terms of purchase for Irish tenants than that department was at first inclined to allow. Afterwards he turned to the subject of Irish education. He appointed commissions to investigate intermediate education (1899) and university education (1901); and he sponsored the Act of 1899 which created a new department of agriculture, industries, and technical instruction for Ireland. He dealt quietly but firmly with the agitations which were stimulated in Ireland by the South African War. He was accused of weakness by The Times newspaper (1902), which drew an unfavourable and unfair contrast between his tendencies and those of the chief secretary, Mr. George Wyndham [q.v.], who had succeeded Mr. Gerald Balfour in 1900. But Lord Cadogan enjoyed the full confidence of Lord Salisbury, by whom he was twice dissuaded from resigning. Though he was in favour of pacifying agrarian discontent by the concessions embodied in the Wyndham Land Bill of 1902, he consistently urged the Cabinet to proclaim disaffected areas and to proceed against seditious newspapers. He resigned in July 1902, at the same time as Lord Salisbury, and retired into private life.
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