will some time or other return to a high position in an English
administration. Whether that administration is to be Liberal or
Conservative we must wait for events to show. One can imagine the
formation of a Conservative Government which might rise to the level of
Hicks-Beach; or one might imagine the formation of a Liberal Government
in which Hicks-Beach could see his way to take office; but I think it
would be hard to realize the idea of such a man being left out of office
or kept out of office for many years. He was, according to my judgment,
the most efficient and capable member of the Conservative Government now
in office, the Government from which he felt himself compelled to
withdraw, or in which, at all events, he was not pressed to continue. He
was not a brilliant figure in that Government. He had not the push and
the energy and the impressive debating powers of Mr. Chamberlain, and he
had not the culture, the grace, and the literary style of Mr. Arthur
Balfour. He made no pretensions whatever to the gift of oratory,
although he had some at least of the qualities which are needed for
oratorical success. His style of speaking is remarkably clear and
impressive. No question, however complex and difficult, seems hard to
understand when explained by Hicks-Beach. He compels attention rather
than attracts it. There are no alluring qualities in his eloquence,
there are no graces of manner or exquisite forms of expression; there is
a cold, almost harsh clearness enforcing itself in every speech. The
speaker seems to be telling his hearers that, whether they agree with
him or not, whether they like him or not, they must listen to what he
has to say. There is a certain quality of antagonism in his manner from
first to last, and he conveys the idea of one who feels a grim
satisfaction in the work of hammering his opinions into the heads of men
who would rather be thinking of something else if the choice were left
to them. "Black Michael" is the nickname familiarly applied to Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach in private conversation by the members of the House
of Commons, and the nickname has found its way into the columns of
"Punch" and other periodicals. The term "Black Michael" does not, we may
assume, refer merely to the complexion of Hicks-Beach, to the color of
his hair; but means to suggest a grim dark-someness about his whole
expression of countenance and bearing. Certainly any one who watches Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach as he sits during a debate in the House of Commons,
waiting for his turn to reply to the attacks on some measure of which he
is a supporter, will easily understand the significance of the
appellation. Hicks-Beach follows every sentence of the speaker then
addressing the House with a stern and ironical gaze of intensity which
seems already to foredoom the unlucky orator to a merciless castigation.
I must say that if I were a member of the House of Commons devoted to
the championship of some not quite orthodox financial theory, I should
not like to know that my exposition of the doctrine was to be publicly
analyzed by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.
Yet Hicks-Beach is not by any means an ungenial man, according to my
observation. Some of his colleagues say that he has a bad temper, or at
least a quick temper; and I must say that I can easily understand how a
man of vigorous intelligence and expansive views might occasionally be
brought into a mood of unphilosophic acrimony by the goings-on of the
present Conservative administration. During my many years of service in
the House of Commons I had opportunities of coming into personal
intercourse with Hicks-Beach, and I have always found him easy of
approach and genial in his manners. At different times while he was
holding office I had to make representations to him privately with
regard to some difficulty arising between an administrative department
and certain localities which felt themselves oppressed, or at least put
at a disadvantage, by the working of new regulations. I always found Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach ready to give a full and fair consideration to every
complaint and to exercise his authority for the removal of any genuine
grievance. But I can easily understand that observers who have not had
personal dealings with Hicks-Beach and have only observed him as he sits
silent, dark, and grim during some debate in the House of Commons, may
well have formed some very decided impressions as to his habitual moods
and tempers. A member of the House once asked me whether I was aware of
the fact that a certain line in one of Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome"
was supposed to contain a prophetic description of Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach. I gave up the puzzle, and then my friend told me that the
description was contained in the lines describing the Roman trumpet-call
which tell that
"The kite knows well the long stern swell."
I hope my American readers will not have quite forgotten the meaning of
the term "swell," now somewhat falling into disuse, but at one time
very commonly employed in England to describe a member of what would now
be called "smart society."
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach has held many offices. He has been
Under-Secretary for the Home Department, and Secretary to the Poor Law
Board; he has been twice Chief Secretary for Ireland, or, to speak more
strictly, Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland; and he has
been twice Chancellor of the Exchequer. I need hardly say that he was
not able to accomplish much during the periods of his Irish
administration. I have said in preceding articles that it is not
possible for the Chief Secretary of a Conservative Government to
accomplish anything worth attempting in the work of Irish
administration. What Ireland demands is the right to manage her own
national affairs in her own domestic Parliament, and there is nothing
worth doing to be done by any government which will not take serious
account of her one predominant claim. No patronage of local charities,
local flower shows, and local racecourses, no amount of Dublin Castle
hospitalities, no vice-regal visits to public schools and municipal
institutions, can bring about any real improvement in the relations
between Great Britain and Ireland. I have no doubt that Hicks-Beach did
all in his power to see that the business of his department was
efficiently and honestly conducted in Dublin Castle, but under the
conditions imposed upon him by Conservative principles it was impossible
for him to accomplish any success in the administration of Irish
affairs. It has often come into my mind that a certain sense of his
limitations in this way was sometimes apparent in the bearing and manner
of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, when he had to take any prominent part in
the business of Dublin Castle. He has an active mind and a ready faculty
of initiative, and there was no place for such a man in the sort of
administrative work which mainly consists in the endeavor to keep things
going as they have been going, and striving after an impossible
compromise between despotic principles and a free constitutional system.
Hicks-Beach, of course, was more in his place when at the head of the
financial department of the administration. He is admitted to have been
one of the most skillful and enlightened among modern Chancellors of the
Exchequer. His financial statements were always thoroughly clear,
symmetrical, and interesting from first to last. He never got into any
entanglement with his figures, and his array of facts was always
marshaled with something like dramatic skill. I do not profess to be
very strong upon financial questions, but I could always understand and
follow with the deepest interest any financial exposition made by
Hicks-Beach. He seemed to me to be distinctly above the level of his
party and his official colleagues on all such questions, and it has
often occurred to me that such a man was rather thrown away upon a
Conservative Government. Whatever else might be said against them, it
could not be said that his speeches at any time sank to the level of the
commonplace. There was something combative in his nature, and his style
of speaking, with its clear, strong, and sometimes almost harsh tones,
appeared as if it were designed in advance to confront and put down all
opposition. The House of Commons had for a long time got into the way of
regarding Hicks-Beach as a man in advance of his colleagues on all
subjects of financial administration. Every Tory in office, or likely to
be in office, now professes himself a free-trader, in the English sense
of the phrase, but Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was evidently a genuine
free-trader, and never could have been anything else since he first
turned his attention seriously and steadily to financial questions. I
should describe him as one of the foremost debaters in the House of
Commons among the men who made no pretensions to the higher order of
eloquence; and probably an additional attraction was given to his
speeches by that aggressive and combative tone which I have just
noticed. I have sometimes fancied that his combativeness of manner and
his dictatorial style were less intended for the discomfiture of his
recognized political opponents than for that of his own colleagues in
office. Long before there was any rumor of incompatibility between
Hicks-Beach and the members of the present Government, I have often
found myself wondering how the man who expressed such enlightened ideas
on so many financial and political questions could possibly get on with
a somewhat reactionary Conservative administration. Of course I have no
means of knowing anything beyond that which is known to the general
public concerning the causes which led to Hicks-Beach's withdrawal or
exclusion from his place in the present Government. Even those London
journals which profess to know everything about the inner councils of
the Cabinet did not, and do not, tell us anything more on this
particular subject than the news, impossible to be concealed, that Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach had ceased to be a member of the Conservative
administration. We were all left to make any conjectures we pleased as
to the cause of this remarkable change, and I feel, therefore, no
particular diffidence in expounding my own theory. During the long
debates on Hicks-Beach's latest Budget proposals, which I had to follow
only through the medium of the newspaper reports, I became possessed
with the idea that Hicks-Beach was performing reluctantly an uncongenial
and almost intolerable task.
Let me recall to the minds of my readers some of the conditions amid
which Hicks-Beach found himself compelled of late to carry on his work.
It should be said, in the first instance, that he never showed himself,
and, as I believe, never could have been, a genuine Tory of the old
school. He never exhibited himself as an uncompromising partisan on any
of the great subjects which arouse political antagonism. He must have
had very little sympathy indeed with the dogmas and the watchwords and
the war-cries of old-fashioned militant Toryism. He never identified
himself with the cause of the Orangemen in Ireland or the principles of
the Jingoes in England. He seldom addressed the House of Commons on any
subjects but those which belonged to his own department, and these were
for the most part questions of finance. When, however, he had
occasionally to take part in debates on subjects connected with
England's foreign policy, he generally spoke with an enlightenment, a
moderation, and a conciliatory tone which would have done credit to any
statesman and seemed little in keeping with the policy and the temper of
modern Toryism. But Hicks-Beach had fallen upon evil days for a man of
his foresight, his intellect, and his temperament generally who had
found a place in a Conservative Cabinet. The policy which led to the
outbreak of the war in South Africa aroused a passion in the English
public mind which found its utmost fury among the partisans of Toryism.
Tory and Jingo became for the time synonymous terms. The man who did not
allow his heart and soul to be filled with the war spirit must have
seemed to most of his friends unworthy to be called a Conservative. Even
among certain sections of the Liberals it required much courage for any
man to condemn or even to criticise with severity the policy which had
led to the war. Any one who ventured on such a course, whether he were
Liberal or Conservative, was straightway branded with the opprobrious
epithet of pro-Boer, and that title was supposed to carry his complete
condemnation. England had come back suddenly to the same kind of
passionate temper which prevailed during the earlier part of the Crimean
War. "He who is not with us is against us," cried the professing
patriots at both times--he who does not glorify the war is a traitor to
his own country and a pro-Boer, or a pro-Russian, as the case might be.
This was the temper with which Hicks-Beach found that he had to deal
during the later years of his financial administration.
It would be out of place to enter into any speculation as to what
Hicks-Beach's own views may have been with regard to the whole policy of
the war. It is now well known that Queen Victoria was entirely opposed
to that policy, although she did not feel that her position as a
constitutional sovereign gave her authority to overrule it by a decision
of her own. There is very good reason to believe that peace was brought
about at last by the resolute exercise of King Edward's influence. It is
at least not unlikely that a man of Hicks-Beach's intellect and
temperament may have been opposed at first to the policy which brought
on the war, but may have, nevertheless, believed that his most patriotic
course would be to remain in the Government and do the best he could for
the public benefit. He soon found himself compelled to perform as
disagreeable a task as an enlightened financial statesman could have to
undertake--the task of extracting from the already overburdened
taxpayers the means of carrying on a war of conquest with which he had
little sympathy. It was perfectly evident that the needed revenue could
not be extracted from the country without some violation of those
financial principles to which Hicks-Beach had long been attached. There
was no time for much meditation--the money had to be found somehow--and
a great part of it could only be found by the imposition of a duty on
foreign imports. We now know from public statements made by Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach himself that while the war was going on he became impressed
with the conviction that the whole administration of the military
department was grossly mismanaged, and that the money of the nation was
thrown away when the War Office came to spend it. The conviction thus
forced upon him could not have tended to make the task of providing
means for such further expenditure any the more agreeable to him. We may
assume that he saw no other course before him than to make the best of a
bad job and try to find in the least objectionable way the amount of
money necessary to carry on the business of the State. It was evident to
him that the principles of free trade must be put aside for the present,
and he found himself driven to the odious necessity of imposing a duty
on the importation of foreign corn, a duty which in fact amounted to a
tax on bread. Hicks-Beach well knew that no tax could be more odious to
the poorer classes of the British Islands; but we may presume that in
his emergency he could see no other way of raising the money, and he
accepted the situation with a dogged resolve which made no pretense at
any concealment of his personal dislike for the task. His manner of
delivering the speech in which he set forth his scheme of finance was
that of a man who has to discharge an odious duty, or what he finds
himself by the force of circumstances compelled to regard as a duty,
but will utter no word which might seem to make out that he has any
excuse other than that of hateful necessity. The substance of
Hicks-Beach's explanations on this part of his budget might be summed up
in such words as these: "We have got to pay for this war, and we have no
time to spare in finding the money; we must cast aside for the time the
principles of free trade; but do not let us further degrade ourselves by
hypocritical attempts to make out that what we are doing is in
accordance with the free-trade doctrine." I remember well that on
reading Hicks-Beach's budget speech I became deeply impressed with the
conviction that his task was becoming so intolerable to him that we
might expect before long to see a change in the composition of the
Government. But it appeared to me that, as the debate went on and the
days went on, the position of Hicks-Beach was becoming more and more
difficult. Some of the members of the Cabinet became to all appearance
suddenly possessed with an inspiration that the time had arrived for a
bold movement of reaction against the long-accepted doctrines of free
trade. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had already receded so far from
the established policy as to propose the imposition of a tax on the
imported materials for making bread; and why, therefore, should we not
take advantage--thus at least I construed their ideas--of this tempting
opportunity to introduce a system of preferential duties and an
imitation Zollverein for England and some of her colonies, and to break
away from the creed and dogmas of men like Gladstone, Cobden, and
Bright? These proposals must have opened to the eyes of Hicks-Beach a
vista of financial heresies into which he could not possibly enter. He
probably thought that he had gone far enough in the way of compromise
when he consented to meet immediate emergencies by the imposition of a
bread-tax. Is it possible that he may have felt some compunctious
visiting because of his having yielded so far to the necessities of the
moment? However that may be, I take it for granted, and took it for
granted at the time, that Hicks-Beach found the incompatibility between
his own views as to the raising of revenue and the views beginning to be
developed by some of his colleagues becoming more and more difficult to
reconcile.
Let me venture on an illustration, although it be not by any means
photographic in its accuracy, of the difficulty with which the
Chancellor of the Exchequer found himself confronted. Let us suppose
Hicks-Beach to be the leader of a pledged society of total abstainers.
At a moment of sudden crisis he feels called upon to relax so far the
rigidity of the society's governing principle as to allow one of its
members who is threatened with utter physical prostration a few drops of
alcoholic stimulant. He finds his course cordially approved by some of
his most influential colleagues, and at first he is proud of their
support. But it presently turns out that they regard his reluctant
concession as the opening up of a new practice in their regulations, and
they press upon him all manner of propositions for the toleration and
even the encouragement of what my friend Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the great
English champion of total abstinence, would term "moderate drunkenness."
Fancy what the feelings of Sir Wilfrid Lawson would be if by some
temporary and apparently needful concession he found himself regarded by
those around him as an advocate of moderate drunkenness! Such, I cannot
help thinking, must have been, in its different way, the condition to
which Sir Michael Hicks-Beach felt himself brought down, when he
discovered that his introduction of an import duty on foreign grain was
believed by his principal colleagues to be but the opening of a
reactionary movement against the whole policy of free trade.
The Government of Lord Salisbury seemed to be in the highest good
spirits at the prospects before them. Mr. Chamberlain in especial seemed
to believe that the time had come for him to develop an entirely new
system of his own for the adjustment of import and export duties. For
many weeks the English newspapers were filled with discussions on Mr.
Chamberlain's great project for the new British Imperial Zollverein, of
which England was to be the head. Numbers of Mr. Chamberlain's
Conservative admirers were filled with a fresh enthusiasm for the man
who thus proposed to reverse altogether the decisions of all modern
political economy laid down by Liberal statesmen and Radical writers.
Stout old Tory gentlemen representing county constituencies began to be
full of hope that the good old times were coming back.
That was the crisis--so far at least as the official career of Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach was concerned for the time. What may have happened
in the private councils of the Government we of the outer world were not
and are not permitted to know. All that we actually do know is that Lord
Salisbury resigned his place as Prime Minister, that Arthur Balfour was
called to succeed him in office, and that a new administration was
formed in which the name of Hicks-Beach did not appear. There were other
changes also made in the administration, but with these I shall not for
the present concern myself. The important fact for this article is that
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was no longer Chancellor of the Exchequer. All
manner of conjectures were made as to the reasons why Lord Salisbury so
suddenly withdrew from the position of Prime Minister, and why he could
not be prevailed upon to hold the place even nominally until after King
Edward's coronation. I do not suppose that the resignation of Lord
Salisbury had anything to do with the fact that Sir Michael Hicks-Beach
ceased to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. The vacancies were not made
simultaneously, nor did there appear any reason to believe that
Hicks-Beach was so closely identified with the political fortunes of
Lord Salisbury as to be unable to remain in office when his leader had
ceased to hold the place of command. So far as an outsider can judge, it
must have been that Hicks-Beach could not get on with the new
administration, or that the new administration could not get on with
him. My own theory, and I only offer it to my readers as the theory of a
mere observer from the outside, is that Hicks-Beach could not stand any
more of the reaction towards protection principles--thought he had gone
quite as far as any sense of duty to his party could exact from him, and
made up his mind that if his colleagues were anxious to go any farther
in what he believed to be the wrong direction they must do so without
any help or countenance from him.
This theory has taken a firmer hold than ever of my mind since I read
the report of a speech lately made by Hicks-Beach weeks and weeks after
he had ceased to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. That recent speech
might have been made by a member of the Liberal Opposition. Certainly in
some of its most important and striking passages it enunciated opinions
and laid down doctrines which might have come from almost any of Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman's colleagues on the front Opposition bench. It
denounced extravagant war expenditure at a time when Imperialist
politicians were calling out for something very like military
conscription, and it insisted that the defense of England by the
strength of her navy ought to be the main consideration of English
statesmanship. That is a doctrine which used to be proclaimed in distant
days by such men as Cobden and Bright, which soon became an accepted
principle among all genuine Liberals, but has lately been repudiated by
all Imperialists, Liberal or Tory, who seem to think that the one great
business of English statesmanship is to turn England into a military
encampment. The natural and reasonable conclusion to be drawn from such
a speech is that during the last session or two of Parliament
Hicks-Beach found it impossible to put up any longer with the reign of
Jingo principles in the Cabinet, and made up his mind to set himself
free from such a domination. The Tory Government has lost its ablest
financial administrator, and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach has regained his
position of independence.