CECIL OF CHELWOOD, EDGAR ALGERNON ROBERT CECIL, 1ST VISCOUNT (1864- ), British states man, known before his elevation to the peerage as Lord Robert Cecil, third son of the third Marquess of Salisbury, was born on Sept. 14, 1864. He was educated at Eton and University college, Oxford, and was a prominent speaker at the Oxford Union. Lord Robert acted as one of his father's private secretaries from 1886 to 1888. He was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1887, and appeared in many important cases. He took silk in 190o.
In 1906 he entered parliament as Conservative member for East Marylebone, and he was one of the principal critics of Bir rell's abortive education bill of that year. On many questions he took a heterodox position from the party point of view. In par ticular he dissociated himself from the tariff reform policy of Chamberlain, and thereby with Parliament from 1910 to 1911, when he was returned at a by-election for the Hitchin division of Herts, retaining this seat until his elevation to the peerage in 1923. He immediately resumed his old place as a powerful, though independent critic of Liberal policy, especially of the disestablish ment of the church in Wales. He was one of the best friends of the women suffragists, and expressed the strongest disapprobation of the violent measures taken against them, though he did not palliate the offences against law and order of the extreme militants. Ultimately, after women had been granted the suffrage, he had the satisfaction of carrying a resolution "to amend the law with re spect to the capacity of women to sit in Parliament" (Oct. 21, 1918).
Lord Robert was in office throughout the World War from the time that the Unionists associated themselves with the Govern ment in May 1915 till the Armistice. As under-secretary for f or eign affairs, then as minister of blockade and lastly as assistant secretary of State for foreign affairs, he was mainly concerned with the vital question of blockade. Lord Robert resigned at the general election of 1918 on the ground that he could not support the decision of the coalition Ministry to treat Welsh disestablish ment as a fait accompli. Though no longer a minister of the crown, he nevertheless went over to Paris in 1919, where he served as chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, and played one of the principal parts, together with President Wilson and Gen. Smuts, in drafting the Covenant. After the peace he advocated increasingly full co-operation in the work of the League of Na tions. In 1920 he attended the first Assembly of the League in Geneva as a representative of South Africa. In Parliament he steadily drifted into opposition to the coalition Ministry, and, though he did not form part of Bonar Law's Unionist Ministry in 1922, he joined Baldwin's first cabinet in May 1923 as Lord Privy Seal. He was raised to the peerage in Dec. 1923. He re turned to office in Baldwin's second cabinet, in Nov. 1924, as chan cellor of the duchy of Lancaster, and on several occasions acted as deputy for the foreign secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, on the Council of the League of Nations. As the principal British representative on the Disarmament Commission at Geneva in 1926-27 he found that his instructions necessitated a policy not in complete accordance with his convictions, and in 1927 he resigned his place in the Baldwin administration because the cabinet failed to support the British delegation in their suggestion of a compro mise on the cruiser question to meet American objections on this point. As joint-president (since 1919) of the League of Nations Union he began a public campaign on the disarmament question.