British journalist, born at Birkenhead, Cheshire, on the 12th of April 1868, of Irish parentage. When quite young he started journalistic work for the Newcastle Chronicle at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and he became a practised leader-writer during his connection with the staff of that paper from 1891 to 1899. He also contributed to the Eastern Morning News at an early period when it was under the editorship of J. A. Spender; and even before 1899, when he joined the editorial staff of the Daily Telegraph in London, he had made himself known in well-informed journalistic circles as a brilliant publicist by his contributions to reviews and otherwise, and particularly by numerous articles on foreign affairs as well as domestic politics, mostly under pseudonyms, in the Fortnightly Review from 1895 onwards. He became editor of the weekly Outlook from 1905 to 1912, and of the evening Pall Mall Gazette from 1912 to 1915; and in 1908 he had also become editor of the Sunday Observer, which he converted into a great organ of opinion with a much-increased circulation, his association with the Observer having in 1921 been maintained continuously during that period. An ardent Imperialist, and intimate supporter of Joseph Chamberlain from the time when the latter became Colonial Secretary in 1895, Mr. Garvin’s championship of the Tariff Reform movement in politics was the most powerful in London journalism from 1903 onwards. Deep in the inspiration of Mr. Chamberlain’s policy and in the Unionist councils, his influence in this respect was felt throughout the political world, and he contributed largely, by his journalistic work and also by lectures and speeches, to the intellectual side of the policy of the Unionist party, especially as represented by Imperialism and Tariff Reform. In this connection he published volumes on Imperial Reciprocity (1903) and Tariff or Budget (1909), and a striking article dealing with the “principles of constructive economics” in the volume of Compatriot Club Lectures (1906). With Mr. L. C. M. Amery and others he was one of the founders and chief supporters of the Compatriots’ Club, which was started in 1903 to provide intellectual backing for the Tariff Reform policy. After the World War, in the course of which his only son, a young man of brilliant promise, was killed at the front, he published The Economic Foundations of Peace (1919), an elaborate plea for reasonable views of reconstruction. In 1920 he was selected to write the official biography of Joseph Chamberlain.
