THE POLITICIAN
The flower and exemplar of well-nigh everything that is choicely and
brutally English may be summed up in the English politician. Such a
tub-thumper, such a master of claptrap and the arts and feints and
fetches of oratory, has never been known before since the world began.
He is English, and therefore he knows his business. He has made a study
of it as a business, and without regard to its more serious issues. His
position is, that, if he would do himself well, he must tie himself
hand and foot to some party, and serve that party through thick and
thin. Then in the end, and with good luck, will come reward. You may
be born in a chandler's shop. By birth, therefore, you belong to the
very lower English middle class. Through the practice of a number of
commercial virtues, and with the help of considerable speculation
outside your own business, you become wealthy. Now, wealth without
honour is nothing to an Englishman. He cannot brook that his wealth,
his shining, glorious superfluity, should be hidden under a bushel.
Therefore he seeks municipal honours; he becomes a town councillor, an
alderman, a mayor even.
But these, after all, are not the summits; they lead at best only to
a common knighthood, and any fool can get knighted if he wants to. So
you determine to seek Parliamentary honours. You subscribe liberally
to the funds of your party, and by-and-by a constituency is found
for you to contest. You lose the fight and subscribe again; another
constituency is found for you, and you win by the skin of your teeth or
with a plumping majority, as the case may be. You are now a full-blown
member of Parliament; it is worth the money and much better than being
a mayor. Up to this time you have been an orator of sorts. You have
held forth from schoolroom platforms and the tops of waggons what time
the assembled populace shouted and threw up its sweaty nightcaps. You
have been carried shoulder high behind brass bands rendering _See, the
Conquering Hero Comes_. Now however, you are really in Parliament; and
for the nonce--for several years, in fact--you must give up talking.
There is plenty for you to do; you may put questions on the paper,
you may get a look in at committee work, you may show electors round
the Houses, and you may go on subscribing liberally to the party
funds. When you have subscribed enough, it is just within the bounds
of possibility that the heads of the party--the Front Bench people,
as it were--will begin to discover that there is virtue in you. You
will be encouraged to make a speech or two at the slackest part of
debates, and some fine day you may be entrusted with the fortunes of
a little Bill which your party wishes to rush through. All the while
you are subscribing liberally to the party funds. After many years,
when you are least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall out of the
universe--that is to say, there is a General Election. You have to
fight your seat; you win; you come nobly back; behold, your party is in
power. Then comes the grand moment of your life. You are shovelled into
the Cabinet on account of services rendered. From this point, if you
possess any ability at all, you can have things pretty much your own
way; and if your ambition has been to hear yourself called "My lord"
before you die, and to see your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great
occasions, and your sons swanking about town with "Hon." before their
names, you can manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves many years
of hard work and lavish expenditure; but it is politically possible in
England for a man to be born on the flags and to die properly set forth
in Burke and Debrett.
I do not say for a moment that the end and aim of every English
politician is the peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his labours
are directed towards some end of honour or emolument, and seldom or
never to the good of the State. It is ambition, and not patriotism,
that fires his bosom; it is self-aggrandisement, and not a desire
for the welfare of the English people, that keeps him going; and it
is party, and not principle, that guides and rules his legislative
actions. Of course, the great art of being a politician is to hide
these facts from the public. If you went down to your constituency
like an honest man and said, "Gentlemen, I wish you to return me to
Parliament in order that I may make a high position for myself, in
order that I may become a man of rank and the founder of a family,"
your constituency would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you go down
with an altogether different tale: "I am going to the House of Commons,
gentlemen, in your interests and not in mine. It will cost me large
sums of money; besides which, as your member, I shall be expected to
subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. But I have the best interests
of Muckington at heart; and, if you honour me by making me your
representative, money is no object."
It is a wonderful business, and a great and a glorious. One stands in
astonishment before the bright English intelligence which takes so
much on promise and gets so little performed. An English party never
goes into power with the intention of doing more than half of what it
has promised to do. At election times its great business is to capture
votes: these must be had at any price short of rank bribery. And, once
landed with the blest, the party immediately settles down, not to the
work of carrying out its promises, but to the far more serious business
of keeping itself in power. From the point of view of the careless
lay-observer, the House of Commons is an assemblage for the discussion
of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being managed in the best
possible way. To the politician it is just an arena in which two sets
of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, ridicule, and bring about the
downfall of each other.
The amount of interest the Englishman is supposed to take in this
amazing assemblage and its doings makes it plain that the Englishman
himself is well-nigh as foolish and well-nigh as oblique as the person
whom he elects to represent him. Next to royalty itself there is nobody
in England who can command so much attention and such a prominent
place in the picture as the politician. If he be a Cabinet Minister
of any standing, it is impossible for him to walk through the streets
either of London or of any of the English provincial towns without
being immediately recognised and "respectfully saluted"; whereas, if he
happens to have come to any metropolitan district or provincial town
on political business bent, he may depend upon being received at the
proper point by the local authorities, supported by a guard of honour
of the local Volunteers, and he may also depend upon more or less of
an ovation on his way to and from the place of meeting.
Year in and year out, too, the illustrated papers of every degree
blossom with his latest photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motorcar;
Mr. So-and-so playing golf; Mr. So-and-so and the King; Mr. So-and-so
addressing the mob from the railway train,--these are pictures in which
every Englishman has delighted from his youth up, and in which he will
always find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As for the journals
which live out of the personal paragraph, they must give--or imagine
they must give--pride of place to the politician, or perish. Little
anecdotes of the sayings and doings of the politically great are always
marketable. It is not necessary that they should have the slightest
foundation in truth; but they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and
flattering to the personage involved.
It is when one turns to the English daily papers, however, that one
begins to understand what an extraordinary hold the political interest
has upon the English public mind. It is well known that, in the main,
the debates in the House of Commons are quite dull, colourless, and
somnolent functions. Half of them take place in the presence only of
the Speaker and a quorum. That is to say, nine nights out of ten,
members spend the greater portion of their time in the smoke-rooms,
dining-rooms, and lobbies, and not in the House itself, the simple
reason being that, as a rule, the debates are not interesting. When
some reputable champion of either party gets on his legs, or when
some wag is up, members manage to attend in force; but it is only
at these moments that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an English
morning newspaper, you will find six columns of that sheet devoted to
a report of the proceedings in Parliament; another three columns of
descriptive matter bearing on the same proceedings; and, out of four or
five leaders, three at least deal with the political question of the
moment. Even when Parliament is not sitting, the first leader is never
by any chance other than political. From the point of view of the
dull English mind, nothing more important than a political happening
can happen in this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. Somebody else
a liar across the floor of the House of Commons. It is essential
for the well-being of the country at large that the episode should
be reported with a separate subhead and great circumstance in the
Parliamentary report; that the scene should be described by the lively
and picturesque pen of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; that
the appearance of the gentleman who called the other gentleman a liar
should be dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of other gentlemen
having called gentlemen liars across the floor of the House should
also be given in the notes; and, finally, that a rotund and windy
leader should be written, wherein is discussed gravely the general
advisability of gentlemen calling other gentlemen liars across the
floor of the House; wherein one is assured that, in spite of occasional
regrettable instances of the kind, the English Parliament is the most
decorous and dignified assemblage under the sun; and wherein we cannot
refrain from paying our tribute of respectful admiration to the Right
Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good sense, and gentleman-like
spirit, coupled with the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of the
procedure of the House becoming to his high position, invariably enable
him to still the storm and to repress the angry passions of our heated
legislators before any great harm has been done. So that a gentleman
who calls another gentleman a liar across the floor of the House of
Commons really renders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch as he
provides them with a gratuitous entertainment, about which they may
read, talk, and argue for at least twenty-four hours.
Recognising their own love of politics and political strife, and
knowing in their hearts that the talk in the House of Commons--not to
mention the House of Lords--is, generally speaking, of the flattest
and flabbiest, one would imagine that the wise English would be at
some pains to take measures calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary
debates and render them of real interest. But no such precautions are
taken. When a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, he is never
by any chance asked if he is prepared, at the psychological moment,
to pull the nose of one of the right honourable gentlemen opposite.
Any member of Parliament who, in the middle of a dull debate, would
walk across the floor and box the ears of, say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord
Hugh Cecil, would thereby earn for himself the distinction of being
the best-discussed and best-described man in England for quite half
a week. Considering the small amount of exertion required for such a
proceeding, and the very large amount of notoriety which would accrue
to the person who ventured on it, one wonders that it has never been
done.
In spite of the abnormal share of publicity and applause which is
extended to the English politician, however, the solemn fact remains
that he is seldom a person of any real force, capacity, understanding,
or character. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, inept, are the epithets
which best describe him. He passes through the legislative chamber or
chambers, says his say in undistinguished speeches, casts his vote,
earns his place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes beyond our
echo and our hail. The daily papers manufacture for him an obituary
notice varying in length from five lines to a couple of columns, and
nobody wants to hear anything more about him. As a matter of fact, he
has left the world neither wiser nor wittier nor happier than he found
it. If he has made one phrase or uttered one sentiment that sticks in
men's minds, he is fortunate. Neither history nor posterity will have
anything to say about him, though in his day he kicked up some fuss and
took up a lot of room. In short, politics as a career in England is
not a career for solid, serious men. It merely serves the turn of the
specious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the vainglorious.