of Europe. M. Caillaux is neither Anglophile nor Anglophobe, but he
thinks, as I do, that Western Europe can only do its full duty to
the rest of the world when it is worked as a unity. Reconciliation
of the Frenchman and the German has been the dominant idea of all
his statecraft. We discussed the riddle why Big Business and the big
industrialists are the fiercest, most mischievous of all patriots. We
concluded it was due to the fact that they work for profits and not
for service, and that a flag means a tariff and such an artificial
enhancement of profits as no unified working could give. And finance
which is international in outlook is by its nature not creative and
revolutionary but watchful, statistical, and extractive. Then also
I broached the question whether, if private capital in industry and
finance could not give us peace, we must prepare for a harder road to
internationalism through the social revolution. And so to other topics.
He asked me not to be hard against France. “You think,” he said, “that
this fear of Germany coming back again is a false fear--an excuse for
aggression. It isn’t. It’s in the blood of our people. Think! Here we
are in the heart of France, and within a little more than a hundred
years this countryside has heard the guns of an invader four times, in
1814, 1815, 1871, and again in 1914.”
M. Caillaux stood before his house and watched me get into the
automobile that would take me to the Paris he may not visit, and waved
his friendly “Good-bye.” Next year, perhaps, they will let him return,
he hopes--or the year after. But he is already sixty....
But the most interesting man from my present point of view that I
met in France was a man under no outward restraint at all. This was
the late M. Philippe Millet, the editor of the _Petit Parisien_, one
of the big official papers. We have been friends for many years, we
saw a good deal of each other at the Washington Conference, and we
had talked to each other very freely and frankly on many occasions
about international relations. For long he had maintained an entirely
civilised attitude towards the European settlement; he had supported
various schemes of economic reconciliation, and he had opposed the
occupation of the Ruhr very vigorously. I took him to task for his
support of M. Poincaré.
His apologetics went in this fashion, and I think they are typical of
the attitude of a considerable section of Frenchmen. He admitted the
Ruhr occupation was an outrage, but he argued that once it was done it
closed the door on any possibility of an understanding with Germany.
Germany had been so antagonised that there was now nothing left for a
Frenchman but to go on destroying her. He was like a man on an omnibus
that was running away downhill. You must do your best to get control of
the thing, but--there is no going back to the top of the hill. France
has got Germany by the throat, and such a level of hate and despair has
been reached that _she dares not let go_.
Of course, M. Poincaré does not want to let go. But I believe the
middling mass of Frenchmen, of whom Philippe Millet was so typical,
a mass which, with the parties of the Left, probably constitutes a
majority of the French, would welcome any outside help that would
enable them to discontinue the strangulation and dismemberment of
Central Europe. An American Government and a British Government united
enough, understanding enough, and tactful enough, to intervene wisely
and generously could swing all that central mass away from Poincaré.
A foolish intervention might very easily throw it into a passion of
patriotic fear. Its incalculable behaviour is a riddle all Europe
is guessing at. The hope of European civilisation rests largely on
this central body of French opinion getting to some sort of effective
expression before it is too late. The French elections in 1924 will be
a very crucial time in human history.
XI
THE LAST OF THE VICTORIANS
24.11.23
Mr. Asquith is now, to use the phrase he coined for a contemporary,
the last of the Victorian “giants.” He is the leader of some sort of
Liberal Party in England, the oldest and the ripest, I am told, though
I confess I am quite unable to make head or tail of these various
Liberal parties in England nowadays, and he is always trying to lead
his little band back to the nineteenth century, when there were ever
so many “giants” in the land, not to mention the Grand Old Man, and
when political life made up for its complete want of seriousness by
a pompous solemnity and vast personal enthusiasms. Prime Ministers
in those days loomed vast; they were none of your little chaps who
can hide behind bull-dog pipes and say nuffin. Our Leaders, figures
of Pantomimic size, filled the stage and said--_floods_. They were
practically all that there was on the stage. The crumbling peace of
Europe and the world, the conflict of labour and order with adventurous
capital, were not staged in those days. At most one heard of these
things in the Legislature as one sometimes catches a rumble of vans
and cabs in a London theatre. In the House they dealt with only
the thin shadows of great issues; with the Free Breakfast Table,
Unsectarian Religious Teaching, Leasehold Enfranchisement, and the like.
One of the most pleasing traits of the Victorian giants was their
tremendous scholarly evasion of all complete statement. The vulgarity
of a plain assignment of a thing to its broad roots and general
principles was never committed. In such matters Mr. Asquith is finely
representative of his period. He has to perfection that ability
to deal with a part of an issue as if it were the whole which was
characteristic of the great Victorian scholars and gentlemen. If Mr.
Asquith were a mechanic, and you asked him to make you an automobile,
he would presently produce two wheels, a clutch, and a radiator with
so perfect and dignified a manner that you would hardly realise that
you had not the complete car until you stepped through it. You would
feel it ungracious to complain. When Mr. Asquith drew the sword and
threw away the scabbard, he did it with so fine a gesture that you
scarcely noted that most of the sword wasn’t there. If Mr. Asquith were
a domestic hen he would lay eggs consisting of about two-thirds of a
shell and as much yolk as would cover a sixpence, but he would cluck so
bravely that you would credit him with a complete omelette. I do not
blame him, it was the style of his time; but his time has passed, and
this is a world too urgent and dangerous for the ample deficiencies of
those spaciously empty years.
These remarks are provoked by the fact that Mr. Asquith and his
associated and rival Liberal leaders--I can never tell which is
which--are now engaged in unfurling the Banner of Free Trade in Great
Britain. Encumbered with an immense and growing burden of unemployed
workmen Britain is thinking of all sorts of eleventh-hour expedients.
Schemes of preference within the Empire, leading towards an Empire
Zollverein, are very much to the fore. And in reply this old Free
Trade, which figured so largely in the political history of Victorian
times, is to be brought out of the shed again, and furbished up and
sent round the country to see what it will do for Liberalism.
Now nothing could be more typical than Free Trade of this peculiar
incompleteness of the political methods of the “giants” of the “heroic”
Victorian Age to which I have already called attention. It is a
one-wheeled, engineless, body-less Liberal automobile. It is a project
to keep down one’s natural frontier in respect to inward and outward
trade, and it ignores all the correlated measures that should go with
this most desirable abolition. It ignores the fact that nearly all the
separate sovereign competitive States into which the world is divided
are always actively engaged in mutual injury, sometimes frankly in open
warfare but always by fiscal trickery, monetary tactics, diversion
of trade, and the like amiable activities. True Free Trade must
be mutual. One-sided Free Trade is like disarmament in the face of
malignant military preparation. And if there is to be real Free Trade
between any two countries then certain other things follow necessarily,
though they never appear on the party programmes and banners.
Production will tend to gravitate to the regions of maximum advantage,
and so there must also be a free movement of population over the
frontiers to the regions of most advantageous employment. If there
is not such free movement, then one of the States may suffer from
unemployment in this or that industry and social degeneration while
the other is enjoying high wages. But movement of population and the
shifting of many industries across frontiers will affect military
efficiency, and so there can be no real Free Trade between any two
countries unless they are ensured not only against mutual attack but by
a mutual guarantee against attack.
Free Trade is, in fact, only a practical proposal between countries
prepared also for free movements of population between each other
and for a pooling of their defensive resources and foreign policy.
The way to permanent and satisfactory Free Trade lies in a steady
extension of leagues between friendly peoples prepared for that much
waiver of their sovereign independence. But only peoples near the same
educational level and with closely similar standards of comfort and
behaviour can contemplate so intimate a union as this. There might be
such a league of the Latin-American States, or of the English-speaking
and Scandinavian and other North-European States, but not of any much
more extensive coalescences at present. So long as a State remains
potentially at war with any other State, Free Trade between them is a
dream.
Great Britain in the Victorian period had a practical monopoly of
modern industrial production and benefited by an open frontier that
gave her workers cheap food and so kept labour cheap. That was a
temporary and now vanished condition of affairs. So long as States
insist on their sovereign independence they must be prepared to use
tariffs just as they must be prepared to use armies. It is the price of
the flag.
Tariffs corrupt. That is true, just as war contracts do. But the way to
escape from these diseases of conflict does not lie in the maintenance
of fiscal non-resistance by this or that independent, irresponsible
State, but in a creative foreign policy that seeks union and
coalescence, and aims, openly and educationally, through coalescence in
a broadening series, to reach at last world Free Trade, world freedom
of movement, and an organised world peace.
But Mr. Asquith will never tell us he means anything so intelligible
as that. He will just wave the banner of Free Trade as though it
meant anything the imagination of the voter might like. That was how
the giants did their business in the grand old days, and he will
never do his business in any other way. And it is because of these
splendid old traditions of pompous vagueness that more and more of the
liberal-minded people of Britain drift towards the Labour camp.
XII
POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE
1.12.23
In the United States of America they know when their elections are
coming, and prepare for them; in Great Britain they come unheralded,
like earthquakes and tidal waves. They may come and come again; there
is no period of immunity.
It is only yesterday that in Great Britain we were all speculating
about this Mr. Baldwin, who had become Prime Minister. What was he?
Where had he come from? Nobody knew. From the first he seemed to share
our doubts about himself. He hid as much as possible behind a big, big,
manly pipe, and made wise little speeches about nothing in particular
at colleges and boys’ schools. He claimed to be a cousin of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling. Now he seems to have given way to panic at the conspicuousness
of his position. The European situation is frightful, and the state of
affairs at home is miserable; and I think he has plunged this country
into all the expense and confusion of a General Election, in the hope
of getting back to the old smoking-room at home, wherever it is, and
tranquillity.
Except in Tasmania and Ireland, where they have Proportional
Representation and an approach to political sanity, all the elections
of the English-speaking democracies are profoundly silly affairs. The
common voter hasn’t a dog’s chance of expressing his real opinion of
things. Some organisations or other put up a couple of candidates
for his constituency, and he votes for the one associated with the
political leaders he dislikes and distrusts least. When the issues are
manifold, as they are in Britain now, the results may be preposterous.
They may fail altogether to indicate the feeling of the country about
any public question at all. The voter is generally in the case of a man
who wants to go shooting, and is confronted with the choice of taking
the family Bible and some cartridges, or a boiled fowl and a gun.
The cardinal fact of the contest is that France is destroying the
economic life of Central Europe, with which the prosperity of Great
Britain is bound up. Great Britain is congested with unemployed, before
whom there does not seem to be any prospect of employment. In the
face of this Mr. Baldwin proposes tariffs to make food and everything
dearer without increasing the purchasing power of any but the very
rich; and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald proposes a levy on large fortunes. Mr.
Asquith, to whom Mr. Churchill the anti-Bolshevik and Mr. Lloyd George
have rallied, raises, as I have already noted in these articles, the
banner of Free Trade--although Free Trade is already in operation in
Great Britain without conspicuous success. And nobody says anything in
particular about France.
Under these circumstances anything may happen. Exaggerated estimates
of the effect of the tariff upon food prices will be used to scare
the struggling voter, and particularly the women, against Protection,
and--as the Labour Party has no Press worth talking about--tremendous
lies will be told about the Capital Levy. It will be represented as
a raid upon the savings bank deposits of the servant girl and the
children’s money-boxes, although as a matter of fact it is not to
touch any fortune under five thousand pounds, and only begins to press
heavily upon twenty thousand and upward. The Labour leaders, being for
the most part respectable but inaudible men, will never get that over
to the public in time. And in the ensuing panic and scrimmage it is
quite possible that that extraordinary old omnibus, the Liberal Party,
with Mr. Asquith the elder statesman, Mr. Churchill the junker, Mr.
Lloyd George the rather world-stained democrat, Sir John Simon, Mr.
Asquith’s once prospective successor, and a miscellany of other people,
pledged really to no more than the negative policy of no Protection
and no Capital Levy, will make quite a respectable run and get quite a
large proportion of its four hundred odd passengers into Westminster.
And what they will do there Heaven knows. Possibly fight among
themselves, and have another dissolution.
Meanwhile, as the struggle for the wheel goes on, the British ship
of state will drift through the winter as it has drifted through the
autumn, and M. Poincaré will continue to do what he likes with Europe.
Now this is really too preposterous a way of running the affairs of
a great people. It is bound to end in some great disaster. These
spasmodic appeals to the country whenever a Prime Minister gets
frightened by the aspect of the skies or whenever a quarrelsome
group has to be reunited somehow, produce a terrible vacillation and
ineffectiveness in the national conduct. It is time Great Britain came
up to date with a triennial or quadrennial election of the Legislature,
after the American and French fashion, and then stayed _put_. And
it is time, too, that Great Britain went beyond, and gave a lead to
America and most of the world by abandoning the present method of
voting with a single vote in a limited constituency, which absolutely
destroys any real choice of representation by the common man. The only
civilised method of democracy is Proportional Representation; in large
constituencies returning many members there is no other method which
gives the individual voter a reasonable opportunity of expressing his
real preference. It is the right way, and all other ways are wrong
and bad. This present election in Great Britain is the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the current system. In the seething mass of British
opinion there are:
Out-and-out Protectionists hostile to Russia and France.
Ditto friendly to Russia but hostile to France.
Ditto hostile to Russia but abject to France.
Protectionists for industry but not for food, hostile to France.
Ditto, but “Hats off to France.”
Anti-Bolshevik Free Traders like Mr. Churchill.
Free Traders friendly to Russia.
Any of the above may or may not be in frantic opposition to an
imaginary Capital Levy upon everybody’s savings.
Labourite Free Traders weak on the Capital Levy.
Labourite Free Traders strong on the Capital Levy.
Labourites strong on the Capital Levy, but weak on Free Trade.
All of the above may be weak or strong or hostile about the present
League of Nations.
All of the above may be strong for the new education, or they may be
anti-educational.
And the poor mutt of a voter in any particular constituency has to
indicate his opinion of things by voting for one of three gentlemen or
ladies selected by the three local political clubs. As candidates they
will do as little as possible in the way of positive statements and
pledges. They will engage chiefly in hostile noises against the other
parties. We shall never get any clear indication from this election
upon any issue of any importance at all. We shall get no clear mandate
either to deal with France or submit to France. We shall get no clear
indication of the feelings of the people about Protection or Free
Trade. We shall have only a slight measure of the panic about the
Capital Levy caused by its misrepresentation. The thing is silly. It is
a monstrous foolery in the face of the needs and dangers of the present
time. The new Parliament will be just as feeble and insecure as the old
Parliament, just as uncertain of popular support, and just as incapable
of taking a strong line in the tragic pass to which British affairs are
coming.
XIII
THE RE-EMERGENCE OF MR. LLOYD GEORGE
8.12.23
That muddle-headed process, the General Election, is over in Great
Britain; the votes have been counted and the results are out--and
everybody now is free to speculate what it was that the British Demos
was trying to say to the world.
The idiotic simplicity of the voting method employed leaves the
intelligent observer entirely free to put whatever interpretation he
likes upon these results, and the British and foreign Press are taking
the fullest advantage of this freedom. Confronted by a complex of
issues and two or three usually very unpalatable candidates, the poor
voter has voted anyhow or abstained from voting. Poor Demos might just
as well have stayed away from the polls altogether for any chance he
has had of expressing himself about France or about Russia or about the
Singapore dockyards or anything of positive importance in the outer
world. The single non-transferable vote system which prevails in the
British communities and in America is almost as good a political gag
as the old Russian autocracy, and may in the end provoke as violent
a reaction. One may conclude that a great number of women voters
were scared by the thought of high prices under a Tariff, and that
the Capital Levy is not the bogy it promised to be. We shall have no
Tariff. Beyond that there are no clear indications of the Will of the
People.
So instructed, Parliament reassembles.
The chief result of the convulsion is that Mr. Lloyd George is back in
the middle of the limelight in his original rôle of a great Liberal
leader. Gestures of reconciliation of an almost scandalous warmth have
characterised all the chief Liberal gatherings, and it is a wonder
to the rest of mankind that British Liberalism ever permitted even
an appearance of dissension. And Mr. Lloyd George has completely and
triumphantly come back. It is his victory as much as it is anybody’s
victory.
Like nearly all Welshmen and many Englishmen, I have a strong but
qualified affection for Mr. Lloyd George. How far that affection is
due to Mr. Lloyd George’s own merits, and how far it is due to the
endearing caricatures of Low, I will not attempt to determine. But we
like his go and we like his bounce and we like his smile. Unless he
is caught vociferating a speech, all his photographs, even the most
casual snapshots, show him smiling the most disarming of smiles. All
Englishmen, except perhaps the Duke of Northumberland, are radicals,
subverters, equalitarians, and revolutionaries, though very many
of us restrain and conceal these qualities, and in some they are
altogether subconscious. (I say “Englishmen” here, and I do not add
“Englishwomen.”) In Mr. Lloyd George--particularly when he smiles or
makes a peer--we recognise our dearest suppressions. His creations
roused the elder peerage at last to open revolt, and that amused us.
Were it not for him and the new newspaper adventurers of the last
quarter-century, Britain would still be ruled by the Cecils and Society.
America, I suspect, feels much the same about him. In the United States
they pick him out from among all other figures in British politics as
theirs. He is much more in the American than the British tradition.
Ever so many American statesmen began as provincial lawyers. The
journey from that Welsh solicitor’s office to Whitehall is the nearest
parallel British political life has yet given to the Log Cabin to White
House adventure.
And Mr. Lloyd George has never had a classical education. He can quote
Welsh but not Greek. A contempt for learning--that is to say, for
classical learning--is another of the hidden things in the soul of
every ordinary Englishman and every plain American. We know secretly
that stuff is an imposture. But we never argue about it--even when
Mr. President Coolidge betrays a belief that an ordinary classical
education involves an understanding of human history. We know in our
bones that it does not. It is not that we despise knowledge, but
that we do not believe that a little Greek and Latin and a few worn
quotations are knowledge. And on the whole Mr. Lloyd George is a very
knowledgeable man.
In no sense of the word, of course, is he an educated man. Lincoln
was. Starting from an almost illiterate adolescence, Lincoln, by an
industrious self-education, achieved wisdom, achieved a profound and
comprehensive perception of world realities; his mind could handle at
last anything the mind of a President of men ever had to handle with
supreme mastery. But Mr. Lloyd George has never built up a strong and
comprehensive body of ideas in that fashion. He has never realised the
need. His mind has not the solid substance of Lincoln’s mind. It is a
quick feminine mind, with extremely rapid intuitions. His judgments
are apt to be as just as they are quick, but he has never got them
together into any system. They are immediate and superficial. He is
mentally disconnected. He retains the prejudices and general ideas of
his upbringing. He has no vision or sense of the world as a whole, no
worked-out conception of the part he might play in the human story. So
it was that opportunity caught him at Versailles and laid him bare.
Within two years of the signing of that treaty, for which he was mainly
responsible, he had learnt better and was trying in his quite feminine
indirect way to mitigate and undo it. He will go on trying. He means
well--always. And he was almost the first statesman of the Coalition
Government to realise the folly of an inveterate quarrel with New
Russia. In dealing with Russia he will be unhampered by that violent
anti-Bolshevik, Mr. Winston Churchill, who is again among the “outs.”
His inconsistencies trouble the common British voter hardly at all. The
logical Frenchman points to his broken pledges. This from the French
point of view constitutes dishonesty. The Anglo-Saxon mind realises
that to be honest one must be inconsistent. We have all made our
mistakes, and muddled back out of them. Life is a puzzling thing full
of surprises. The one thing the British will never understand is the
tremendous persistence of M. Poincaré. It impresses them as invincible
stupidity.