MR. ASQUITH
_"Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is
lowered: they become less in earnest about those of their opinions
respecting which they must remain silent in the society they
frequent: they come to look upon their most elevated objects as
unpractical, or at least too remote from realization to be more
than a vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they
retain their higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the
persons and affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the
modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy
from the company they keep."_--JOHN STUART MILL.
Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall from
power: it was as if a pin had dropped.
Great men do not at any time fall in so ignominious a fashion, much less
when the fate of a great empire is in the balance.
The truth is that Mr. Asquith possesses all the appearance of greatness
but few of its elements. He has dignity of presence, an almost
unrivalled mastery of language, a trenchant dialectic, a just and
honourable mind; but he is entirely without creative power and has
outgrown that energy of moral earnestness which characterized the early
years of his political life.
He has never had an idea of his own. The "diffused sagacity" of his mind
is derived from the wisdom of other men. He is a cistern and not a
fountain.
His scholarship has made no difference to scholarship. His moral
earnestness has made no difference to morality. He acquired scholarship
by rote, politics by association, and morality by tradition. To none of
these things did he bring the fire of original passion. The force in his
youth was ambition, and the goal of his energy was success. No man ever
laboured harder to judge between the thoughts of conflicting schools;
few men so earnest for success ever laboured less to think for
themselves. He would have made a noble judge; he might have been a
powerful statesman; he could never have been a great man as Mazzini,
Bismarck, and Gladstone were great men.
There are reasons for suspecting his moral qualities. When he allowed
Lord Haldane to resign from the Cabinet at the shout of a few ignorant
journalists he sacrificed the oldest of his friends to political
exigencies. This was bad enough; but what made it worse was the
appearance of heroic courage he assumed in paddling to Lord Haldane's
rescue long after the tide of abuse had fallen. During the time he
should have spoken to the whole nation, during the time he should have
been standing sword in hand at the side of his friend, he was in
negotiation with Sir Edward Carson.
It is a mistake to say that he brought England into the war. England
carried Mr. Asquith into the war. The way in which politicians speak of
Mr. Asquith as having "preserved the unity of the nation" in August,
1914, is index enough of the degraded condition of politics. A House of
Commons that had hesitated an hour after the invasion of Belgium would
have been swept out of existence by the wrath and indignation of the
people. Mr. Asquith was the voice of England in that great moment of her
destiny, a great and sonorous voice, but by no means her heart. He kept
faction together at a moment when it was least possible for it to break
apart; but he did not lead the nation into war. It was largely because
he seemed to lack assurance that Lord Haldane was sacrificed. The Tories
felt that Mr. Asquith would not make war whole-heartedly: they looked
about for a scapegoat; Lord Haldane was chosen for this purpose by the
stupidest of the Tory leaders; and the bewildered Prime Minister, with
no mind of his own, and turning first to this counsellor and then to
that, sacrificed the most intellectual of modern War Ministers, called
Sir Edward Carson, to his side, and left the British war machine to Lord
Kitchener.
We must make allowance for the time. No minister in our lifetime was
confronted by such a gigantic menace. Moreover, the Cabinet was not
united. Mr. Asquith came out of that tremendous ordeal creditably, but
not, I think, as a great national hero. As for his conduct of the war,
it was dutiful, painstaking, dignified, wise; but it lacked the
impression of a creative original mind. He did not so much direct policy
and inspire a nation as keep a Cabinet together. One seemed to see in
him the decorative chairman of a board of directors rather than the
living spirit of the undertaking.
When the historian comes to inquire into the trivial consequences of Mr.
Asquith's fall from power he will be forced, I think, to lift that veil
which Mr. Asquith has so jealously drawn across the privacy of his
domestic life. For although he ever lacked the essentials of greatness,
Mr. Asquith once possessed nearly all those qualities which make for
powerful leadership. Indeed it was said in the early months of the war
by the most able of his political opponents that it passed the wit of
man to suggest any other statesman at that juncture for the office of
Prime Minister.
His judicial temperament helped him to compose differences and to find a
workable compromise. His personal character won the respect of men who
are easily influenced by manner. There was something about him superior
to a younger generation of politicians--a dignity, a reticence, a proud
and solid self-respect. With the one exception of Mr. Alfred Spender, a
man of honour and the noblest principles, he had no acquaintance with
journalism. He never gave anybody the impression of being an
office-seeker, and there was no one in Parliament who took less pains to
secure popularity. Above all things, he never plotted behind closed
doors; never descended to treason against a rival.
Search as men may among the records of his public life they will fail to
discover any adequate cause of his fall from power. He was diligent in
office; he took always the highest advice in every military dispute;
settled the chief difficulty at the War Office without offence to Lord
Kitchener; he gave full rein to the fiery energy of Mr. Lloyd George; he
was in earnest, but he was never excited; he was beset on every side,
but he never failed to maintain the best traditions of English public
life; he was trusted and respected by all save a clique. Even in the
humiliation of the Paisley campaign he was so noble a figure that the
indulgence with which he appeared to regard the rather violent aid of a
witty daughter was accepted by the world as touchingly paternal--the old
man did not so much lean upon the arm of his child as smile upon her
high-spirited antics.
One must trespass upon the jealously guarded private life to discover
the true cause of his bewildering collapse. Mr. Asquith surrendered some
years ago the rigid Puritanism of early years to a domestic circle which
was fatal to the sources of his original power. Anyone who compares the
photographs of Mr. Asquith before and after the dawn of the twentieth
century may see what I mean. In the earlier photographs his face is
keen, alert, powerful, austere; you will read in it the rigidity of his
Nonconformist upbringing, the seriousness of his Puritan inheritance,
all the moral earnestness of a nobly ambitious character. In the later
photographs one is struck by an increasing expression of festivity, not
by any means that beautiful radiance of the human spirit which in
another man was said to make his face at the age of seventy-two "a
thanksgiving for his former life and a love-letter to all mankind," but
rather the expression of a mental chuckle, as though he had suddenly
seen something to laugh at in the very character of the universe. The
face has plumped and reddened, the light-coloured eye has acquired a
twinkle, the firm mouth has relaxed into a sportive smile. You can
imagine him now capping a "_mot_" or laughing deeply at a daring jest;
but you cannot imagine him with profound and reverend anxiety striving
like a giant to make right, reason, and the will of God prevail.
Like Mr. Lloyd George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which
brought him to the seats of power. A domestic circle, brilliant with the
modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and
audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism. He has found
recreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been
nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter
rather than conversation has been as it were prescribed for him, and
when he should have been thinking or sleeping he has been playing cards.
It is possible to argue that this complete change from the worries of
the day's work has been right and proper, and that his health has been
the better for it; but physical well-being can be secured by other
means, and no physical well-being is worth the loss of moral power.
There are some natures to whom easy-going means a descent. There are
some men, and those the strongest sons of nature, for whom the kindest
commandment is, "Uphill all the way."
Mr. Asquith, both by inheritance and temperament, was designed for a
strenuous life, a strenuous moral life. He was never intended for
anything in the nature of a _flâneur_. If he had followed his star, if
he had rigorously pursued the path marked out for him by tradition and
his own earliest propensities, he might have been an unpleasant person
for a young ladies' tea-party and an unsympathetic person to a gathering
of decadent artists; he might indeed have become as heavy as Cromwell
and as inhuman as Milton; but he would never have fallen from Olympus
with the lightness of thistledown.
LORD NORTHCLIFFE
LORD NORTHCLIFFE, FIRST VISCOUNT (ALFRED CHARLES WILLIAM HARMSWORTH)
Born, 1865, in Dublin. Educ.: in Trade Schools; trained as a
book-seller, and worked in the establishment of George Newnes;
LL.D., Rochester Univ., U.S.A.; Proprietor of the London _Times,
Daily Mail_, and a number of other journals; Cr. Bart. in 1904;
Viscount, 1917; Chairman of the British War Mission to the United
States, 1917; Director of the Aerial Transport Committee, 1917;
Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, 1918.
[Illustration: LORD NORTHCLIFFE]