_AUTHUR JAMES BALFOUR_
When Lord Rosebery brought his brief Administration to an end, Lord
Salisbury became Prime Minister for the last time. His physical
energy was no longer what it once had been, and the heaviest of
all bereavements, which befell him in 1899, made the burden of
office increasingly irksome. He retired in 1902, and was succeeded
by his nephew, Mr. A. J. Balfour, The Administration formed in
1895 had borne some resemblance to a family party, and had thereby
invited ridicule--even, in some quarters, created disaffection.
But when Lord Salisbury was nearing the close of his career, the
interests of family and of party were found to coincide, and everybody
felt that Mr. Balfour must succeed him. Indeed, the transfer of
power from uncle to nephew was so quietly effected that the new
Prime Minister had kissed hands before the general public quite
realized that the old one had disappeared.
Mr. Balfour had long been a conspicuous and impressive figure in
public life. With a large estate and a sufficient fortune, with
the Tory leader for his uncle, and a pocket-borough bidden by that
uncle to return him, he had obvious qualifications for political
success. He entered Parliament in his twenty-sixth year, at the
General Election of 1874, and his many friends predicted great
performances. But for a time the fulfilment of those predictions
hung fire. Disraeli was reported to have said, after scrutinizing
his young follower's attitude: "I never expect much from a man
who sits on his shoulders."
Beyond some rather perplexed dealings with the unpopular subject of
Burial Law, the Member for Hertford took no active part in political
business. At Cambridge he had distinguished himself in Moral Science.
This was an unfortunate distinction. Classical scholarship had been
traditionally associated with great office, and a high wrangler
was always credited with hardheadedness; but "Moral Science" was
a different business, not widely understood, and connected in the
popular mind with metaphysics and general vagueness. The rumour
went abroad that Lord Salisbury's promising nephew was busy with
matters which lay quite remote from politics, and was even following
the path of perilous speculation. It is a first-rate instance of
our national inclination to talk about books without reading them
that, when Mr. Balfour published _A Defence of Philosophic Doubt_,
everyone rushed to the conclusion that he was championing agnosticism.
His friends went about looking very solemn, and those who disliked
him piously hoped that all this "philosophic doubt" might not end
in atheism. It was not till he had consolidated his position as a
political leader that politicians read the book, and then discovered,
to their delight, that, in spite of its alarming name, it was an
essay in orthodox apologetic.
The General Election of 1880 seemed to alter the drift of Mr. Balfour's
thought and life. It was said that he still was very philosophical
behind the scenes, but as we saw him in the House of Commons he was
only an eager and a sedulous partisan. Gladstone's overwhelming
victory at the polls put the Tories on their mettle, and they were
eager to avenge the dethronement of their Dagon. "The Fourth Party"
was a birth of this eventful time, and its history has been written
by the sons of two of its members. With the performances of Lord
Randolph Churchill, Sir John Gorst, and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff I
have no concern; but the fourth member of the party was Mr. Balfour,
who now, for the first time, began to take a prominent part in
public business. I must be forgiven if I say that, though he was
an admirable writer, it was evident that Nature had not intended
him for a public speaker. Even at this distance of time I can recall
his broken sentences, his desperate tugs at the lapel of his coat,
his long pauses in search of a word, and his selection of the wrong
word after all.
But to the Fourth Party, more than to any other section of the
House, was due that defeat over the Budget which, in June, 1885,
drove Gladstone from power and enthroned Lord Salisbury. In the
new Administration Mr. Balfour was, of course, included, but his
sphere of work was the shady seclusion of the Local Government
Board, and, for anything that the public knew of his doings, he
might have been composing a second treatise on philosophic doubt or
unphilosophic cocksureness. The General Election of 1885 marked a
stage in his career. The pocket-borough which he had represented since
1874 was merged, and he courageously betook himself to Manchester,
where for twenty years he faced the changes and chances of popular
election.
The great opportunity of his life came in 1887. The Liberal party,
beaten on Home Rule at the Election of 1886, was now following its
leader into new and strange courses. Ireland was seething with
lawlessness, sedition, and outrage. The Liberals, in their new-found
zeal for Home Rule, thought it necessary to condone or extenuate
all Irish crime; and the Irish party in the House of Commons was
trying to make Parliamentary government impossible.
At this juncture Mr, Balfour became Chief Secretary; and his appointment
was the signal for a volume of criticism, which the events of the
next four years proved to be ludicrously inapposite. He, was likened
to a young lady--"Miss Balfour," "Clara," and "Lucy"; he was called
"a palsied, masher" and "a perfumed popinjay"; he was accused of
being a recluse, a philosopher, and a pedant; he was pronounced
incapable of holding his own in debate, and even more obviously
unfit for the rough-and-tumble of Irish administration.
The Irish, party, accustomed to triumph over Chief Secretaries,
rejoicingly welcomed a new victim in Mr. Balfour. They found, for
the first time, a master. Never was such a tragic disillusionment.
He armed himself with anew Crimes Act, which had the special merit
of not expiring at a fixed period, but of enduring till it should
be repealed, and he soon taught sedition-mongers, Irish and English,
that he did not bear this sword in vain. Though murderous threats
were rife, he showed an absolute disregard for personal danger, and
ruled Ireland with a strong and dexterous hand. His administration
was marred by want of human sympathy, and by some failure to
discriminate between crime and disorder. The fate of John Mandeville
is a black blot on the record of Irish government; and it did not
stand alone.
Lord Morley, who had better reasons than most people to dread Mr.
Balfour's prowess, thus described it:
"He made no experiments in judicious mixture, hard blows and soft
speech, but held steadily to force and tear.... In the dialectic of
senate and platform he displayed a strength of wrist, a rapidity,
an instant readiness for combat, that took his foes by surprise, and
roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics
of our day."
It is not my business to attack or defend. I only record the fact
that Mr. Balfour's work in Ireland established his position as
the most important member of the Conservative party. In 1891 he
resigned the Chief Secretaryship, and became Leader of the House;
was an eminently successful Leader of Opposition between 1892 and
1895; and, as I said before, was the obvious and unquestioned heir
to the Premiership which Lord Salisbury laid down in 1902.
As Prime Minister Mr. Balfour had no opportunity for exercising
his peculiar gift of practical administration, and only too much
opportunity for dialectical ingenuity. His faults as a debater
had always been that he loved to "score," even though the score
might be obtained by a sacrifice of candour, and that he seemed
often to argue merely for arguing's sake. It was said of the great
Lord Holland that he always put his opponent's case better than the
opponent put it for himself. No one ever said this of Mr. Balfour;
and his tendency to sophistication led Mr. Humphrey Paul to predict
that his name "would always be had in honour wherever hairs were
split." His manner and address (except when he was debating) were
always courteous and conciliatory; those who were brought into
close contact with him liked him, and those who worked under him
loved him. Socially, he was by no means as expansive as the leader
of a party should be. He was surrounded by an adoring clique, and
reminded one of the dignitaries satirized by Sydney Smith: "They
live in high places with high people, or with little people who
depend upon them. They walk delicately, like Agag. They hear only
one sort of conversation, and avoid bold, reckless men, as a lady
veils herself from rough breezes."
But, unfortunately, a Prime Minister, though he may "avoid" reckless
men, cannot always escape them, and may sometimes be forced to
count them among his colleagues. Lord Rosebery's Administration was
sterilized partly by his own unfamiliarity with Liberal sentiment,
and partly by the frowardness of his colleagues. Mr. Balfour knew
all about Conservative sentiment, so far as it is concerned with
order, property, and religion; but he did not realize the economic
heresy which always lurks in the secret heart of Toryism; and it
was his misfortune to have as his most important colleague a "bold,
reckless man" who realized that heresy, and was resolved to work
it for his own ends. From the day when Mr. Chamberlain launched
his scheme, or dream, of Tariff Reform, Mr. Balfour's authority
steadily declined. Endless ingenuity in dialectic, nimble exchanges
of posture, candid disquisition for the benefit of the well-informed,
impressive phrase-making for the bewilderment of the ignorant--these
and a dozen other arts were tried in vain. People began to laugh
at the Tory leader, and likened him to Issachar crouching down
between two burdens, or to that moralist who said that he always
sought "the narrow path which lies between right and wrong." His
colleagues fell away from him, and he was unduly ruffled by their
secession. "It is time," exclaimed the Liberal leader, "to have
done with this fooling"; and though he was blamed by the Balfourites
for his abruptness of speech, the country adopted his opinion.
Gradually it seemed to dawn on Mr. Balfour that his position was
no longer tenable. He slipped out of office as quietly as he had
slipped into it; and the Liberal party entered on its ten years'
reign.