LORD LEVERHULME
_"Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much
more of it, and it is better organized and more naturally cohesive_
inter se. _So the Arctic volcano can do nothing against Arctic
ice."_--SAMUEL BUTLER.
The reader may properly wonder to find the figure of Lord Leverhulme
brought before the mirrors of Downing Street.
But let me explain why I introduce this industrial Triton into the
society of our political minnows.
Lord Leverhulme rejected politics only when politics rejected him. He is
of that distinguished company to whom the House of Commons has turned
both a deaf ear and a cold shoulder. He failed where Mr. Walter Long
succeeded, and fell where Dr. Macnamara rose.
I once asked a Cabinet Minister how it was that a man of such
conspicuous quality had failed to win office. "I really cannot tell
you," he replied with complacency, "but I remember very well that the
House of Commons never took to him. It is curious how many men who do
well outside the House of Commons fail to make good inside."
Curious indeed! But more curious still, we may surely say, that the
House of Commons should continue, in the light of this knowledge, to
enjoy so good an opinion of itself.
I suppose that nobody will now dispute that Lord Leverhulme is easily
the foremost industrialist, not merely in the British Isles, but in the
world. I can think of no one who approaches him in the creative faculty.
Not even America, the country of big men and big businesses, has
produced a man of this truly colossal stature. Mr. Rockefeller is a name
for a committee. Mr. Carnegie was pushed to fortune by his more resolute
henchmen. But Lord Leverhulme, as is very well known in America, has
been the sole architect of his tremendous fortunes, and in all his
numerous undertakings exercises the power of an unquestioned autocrat.
Mr. Lloyd George once remarked to me that the trouble with Lord
Leverhulme is that he cannot work with other men. But this is only true
in part. Lord Leverhulme can work very well with men who are not fools.
When I told him of Mr. Lloyd George's remark, "Well, I don't know," he
replied, "I have been working with other men all my life!" Yes, but
this, too, expresses only part of the truth. He has been working with
these other men as an accepted master.
It is not so in politics. There a man of power cannot pick and choose
his colleagues. He must work with fools as well as men of ability. And
never can he work as a master. Always at the Cabinet table he will find
a cabal of deadheads opposed to the exercise of his authority, and in
the department over which he is set to rule a bunch of traditional
Barnacles, without one spark of imagination between them, who will fight
his new ideas at every turn.
The essence of politics and government is mediocrity. The good sense of
the House of Commons is a conspiracy to resist genius and to enthrone
the average man. A department of the State is well governed only when
its chief Civil Servant, by the grace of God, chances to be a man of
statesmanlike capacity.
Like Lord Rhondda, Lord Leverhulme was approached by the Government
during the numerous crises of the war to render service to the State.
His experience in this respect confirmed his judgment that our system of
government is a chaos which would hardly be tolerated in a business
establishment of the second class. I will give an incident.
It was a matter of grave urgency to the Government that margarine should
be manufactured in this country. A Cabinet Minister begged Lord
Leverhulme, on the score of patriotism, to set up such a factory. Lord
Leverhulme expressed his willingness to take up the project, but said
that he must go to the public for a certain sum of money to carry it
out. The Cabinet Minister made no demur to this very natural proposal,
but suggested that it might be well if Lord Leverhulme would call at the
Treasury and inform them of his purpose.
Accordingly the great industrialist, able as was no other man in this
particular to serve his country's need, called humbly at the Treasury
for permission to ask the public for capital. He was received by an
official who refused point-blank to listen to such a proposition. Lord
Leverhulme mentioned again the name of the Cabinet Minister who had
requested him to embark on this venture. This was nothing to the
official. He had nothing to do with other departments. His business was
to see that the public's money came to the Treasury; he was certainly
not going to countenance the raising of money for an industrial purpose.
You could no more have got into this gentleman's head than you could
have got into the head of a rabbit the idea that money invested in an
essential industrial undertaking pays the State far better than money
advanced to it at the cost of five per cent.
Not to weary the reader with an incident, however telling, the end of
this affair was that after going backwards and forwards between a
Cabinet Minister and a Treasury official, Lord Leverhulme was at last
permitted to ask the public for a small sum of money which he himself
considered inadequate for the Government's purpose.
I have never heard him speak bitterly of his political experiences, but
I have never heard him express anything but an amused contempt for the
antiquated machinery which passes amongst politicians for a system of
government.
The English [he says] have pushed their fortunes, never by the aid
of Government, but on the contrary almost always in the teeth of
Government opposition. There is no man so lacking in imagination as
a Government official, and no man, unless it is a banker, so
wanting in courage as a Cabinet Minister. The wealth of England is
the creation of her industrial population. The brains, the faith,
the energy of the capitalist, and the brains, the loyalty, the
strength of labour, these have made us the first nation of the
world. There has been only one real obstacle in our path. Not
foreign competition, for that is an incentive, but the cowardice
and stupidity of Governments. We possess an empire unrivalled in
its opportunities for trade and commerce, an empire which, you
would surely think, could not fail to inspire a statesman with
great ideas. But what happens? We have a Government which thinks it
has exhausted statesmanship by crippling industry at home in order
to pay off our war debt as quickly as possible. Instead of setting
itself to create more wealth, with the wealth of the world lying at
its feet, it sets itself to dry up the sources of wealth at the
centre of the empire. But it is no use talking. One thing a
Government in this country cannot stand is imagination; and another
is courage. The British Empire is in the hands of a lot of
clerks--and timid clerks at that. We must do our best to get along
without statesmanship at the head.
The reader may not remember that some years before Mr. Lloyd George
plunged into a disordered series of social reforms, Lord Leverhulme,
sitting in the House of Commons, introduced Bills of a reasonable and
connected character to ensure workmen against unemployment and to set up
a system of old age pensions. He did not enter Parliament for his own
glorification. He had nothing to gain, but much to lose, by devoting
himself to the business of Westminster. But he believed that he could
benefit the State as a legislator, and he entered Parliament with the
definite intention of introducing order into what was self-evidently a
condition of dangerous chaos. He had a remedy for slums, a remedy for
unemployment, a remedy for the poverty of the workman in old age, and a
remedy for the educational deadlock. Further, he cherished the hope that
he might do something towards developing the wealth and power of the
British Empire, without impairing the spirit of individualism which, in
his faith, is the driving power of British fortune.
How many men who entered the House of Commons with no ideas at all have
been taken to the friendly bosom of that assembly? Moreover, can the
reader name with confidence one Cabinet Minister in the past twenty
years who can fairly be compared in creative genius with this remarkable
man to whom the House of Commons refused the least of its rewards?
I saw Lord Leverhulme on several occasions at the end of the war. He
spoke to me with great freedom of his ideas in the hope that I might
carry them with effect to the Prime Minister. He proved to me that it
was the nonsense of a schoolboy to talk of making Germany pay for the
war, and suggested that the Prime Minister's main appeal to the nation
at the General Election of 1918 should be a moral appeal for unity in
the industrial world. He had one master word for that great moment in
our history. It was the word "Production."
I found this word unpopular in Downing Street. Mr. Lloyd George was more
mindful of Lord Northcliffe than of one "who cannot work with other
men." And so the word went forth to the British peoples: Germany must
pay for the war and the Kaiser must be tried. At the eleventh hour
before the election there was no equivocation. Germany _should_ pay for
the war. The Kaiser _should_ be tried. Instead of a great moral appeal,
which might have prevented all the disastrous conflicts in industry, and
might have preserved the spirit of loyalty which had united the people
during the war, the Prime Minister put himself at the head of a
disreputable mob calling for revenge.
"One disadvantage of the democratic system," says Mr. Birrell, "is that
a Prime Minister no longer feels himself responsible for good
government. He awaits a 'mandate' from a mob who are watching a football
match."
We have only to compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord
Leverhulme's to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend
more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside.
Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of
rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such
sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of
the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a
Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and
creative minds is the field of commerce.
The danger of the State from this condition of things is, unhappily, not
only the loss of creative statesmanship at the head of the
nation--serious as that is. The danger is greater. Small men are more
likely to fall into dishonest ways than big men. There lies, I think,
our greatest danger. It seems to me, observing our public life with some
degree of intimacy, that there is a growing tendency for the gentleman
to fall out of the political ranks and for his place to be filled by the
professional politician, who in many cases appears to be almost entirely
without moral principle. What can become of such a movement save
eventual corruption? At present our politics are stupid but fairly
honest. There are still representatives of the old school in the House
of Commons. But the conquering advance is from the ranks of
professionalism.
I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a
heaven-sent genius of statesmanship. The British constitution is twelve
men in a box, and the very spirit of that arrangement is distrust of the
expert. Moreover, there is wisdom in the Eastern legend which says that
in making genius the fairies left out one essential gift--the knowledge
of when to stop.
Whether Lord Leverhulme would have made a better statesman than, let us
say, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman or Mr. Bonar Law it is surely certain,
I think, that a true statesman would have made every conceivable use of
his unusual mind. This, as I look at things, is the ideal method of
government. I do not believe in the business man as statesman. I believe
in the trained, cultured, and incorruptible gentleman as statesman, and
the business man as his adviser.
But until our politics are of a higher order we can hardly expect the
best minds in the nation to feel any attraction to a political career.
More and more the professional politician, the narrow man, the man of
the loud voice and the one idea, the man who has few instincts of
honesty in his mind and no movement of high and disinterested patriotism
in his soul, will press himself upon the attention of democracy and by
intimidating his leaders and brow-beating his opponents force his way
onward to office.
The consideration of this grave peril to the moral character of our
public life brings me to my brief conclusion.
CONCLUSION