THE FRINGE OF POLITICS
"It makes all the difference in the world whether we put Truth in
the first place or in the second place."
WHATELEY (quoted by Lord Morley in _Compromise_).
I
Though by the outbreak of war, their progress towards the House
of Commons had brought but few of the younger politicians to a
constituency and fewer still to a contested election, a great
part of the years from 1909 until 1914 was inevitably taken up by
political studies in a highly-charged atmosphere. The controversies
of that time were waged with a bitterness of which the straitest
recluse could not remain unaware; and the unsated passions of
Westminster were carried to Pall Mall and fed to new inspiration in
the adjoining, ever-open temples of the two great parties.
The Reform Club, own sister to Bridgewater House, standing between
the Travellers' and the Carlton, is the home constructed by Sir
Charles Barry for the supporters of the reform act of 1832 and
for their successors. A necessary qualification for membership is
that the candidate shall be a "reformer", though the rules do not
indicate whether it is sufficient for him to support the reform of
the divorce law or of the tariff; and until 1886 a reformer and a
liberal were synonymous. After the home rule split of that year,
the Gladstonians in this as in every liberal club blackballed
a Hartingtonite candidate, the Hartingtonites blackballed a
Gladstonian candidate, and both combined to blackball an uncertain
candidate till a truce had to be declared if the club was to
survive. In the headquarters of the liberal party, so loveless a
union was doomed to a short life; when incompatibility of temper
passed beyond patience and hope, judgement was given for the home
rulers; and, though a few of the unionists kept their names on
the books, the majority of the seceders drew daily closer to the
conservative party, and the club once more became the headquarters
of liberalism.
So it has remained to this day; and the chief party meetings,
such as that in December 1916 when Mr. Asquith announced to his
followers the resignation of the first coalition, take place within
its walls; though mercifully free from the control of the party
whips, it is still to liberalism very much what the Carlton is to
conservatism; a liberal member of Parliament takes precedence of
other candidates in the order of election; and the only problem
that can now perplex the club is the old question, "What is a
liberal?" and the new rider, "Who is leader of the liberal party?"
It was not to be expected that the conditions of life in even the
oldest and most famous clubs could escape the social revolution
which was observable before the war and which the war accelerated.
For several years before 1914 the peculiar glory of club life
in London was coming to be regarded as one of London's departed
glories: the parsimonious father no longer automatically entered
his infant son's name for five or six clubs, the impatient
candidate was no longer content to linger indefinitely in the upper
reaches of a waiting-list, and the growing absence of restraint
in all social relationships broke out into intolerance of the
crusted conservatism to which young members of other days had
submitted uncomplainingly. The war, in checking the normal flow of
fresh blood, caused some clubs to waste and die, others to turn a
more anæmic scrutiny on the qualifications of their candidates;
and, with the coming of peace, the cry has again been heard that
even the most historic institutions must modernize themselves or
forfeit the allegiance of those who require a place where they can
play squash racquets and invite women to meals. It is so doubtful
whether club life will ever regain its Victorian popularity and
prestige that a student of changing manners may perhaps be forgiven
for halting to uncover at the sound of one more passing bell.
As the nebulous quality of being a reformer is the sole positive
requirement of a candidate for the Reform Club, the membership is
more varied than in most. Naturally, liberal politicians abound;
the bar and civil service are well represented, but probably no
association which is primarily political contains also quite so
many non-political elements. From the days of Thackeray and James
Payn to those of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett it has always bound
a spell on men of letters: Henry James had a bedroom there in his
later years; and novelists, whether or no they can boast the honour
of membership, alike seem unable to keep it out of their novels.
Jules Verne laid the first and last scenes of _Round the World in
Eighty Days_ in the card-room of the club, and it is chastening for
a vegetarian to reflect that in those virile days your reformer
breakfasted succulently off steaks and chops; it is impossible not
to suspect more than one sly description in some of H. G. Wells'
later novels, while in _Marriage_--beyond doubt or cavil--one
character leaves the ice and idealism of Labrador, if not for
the flesh-pots of the Reform Club, at least with the knowledge
that "pressed beef, such as they'll give you at the Reform, too,
that's good eating for a man. With chutnee, and then old cheese to
follow...."
From a corner of the Reform Club young political aspirants had an
unrivalled opportunity of watching for ten years the history of
liberalism in the making. With hardly an exception the ministers
were all members; and most of them used the club regularly.
The great liberal triumph of 1906 had brought everything but
homogeneity: there was enthusiasm, authority and numbers, but there
was also suspicion and a memory of old feuds. The Liberal Leaguers,
it was generally believed, would have liked to banish Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman to the House of Lords; but both he and his
backing of nonconformist radicals were too strong for them. On his
resignation the liberal party presented the anomalous spectacle
of a radical, peace-loving, nonconformist body with a Liberal
League head; and the first election of 1910 was required to unify
the party. In the cabinet and in the House of Commons there is a
difference, almost incomprehensible to those outside, between the
position of a prime minister who has succeeded to the heritage won
by another and the position of a prime minister who has gone into
action at the head of his army and has been invoked and acclaimed
in five hundred single combats. Though he had squandered the vast
majority which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman bequeathed to him, Mr.
Asquith returned in 1910 with enhanced prestige as the leader of a
party which had gone to the polls in his name.
The years from 1906 until 1910--the "Mad Parliament"[18]--had been
primarily a time of political education or disillusion for the
liberals who entered the House of Commons with unlimited idealism,
limited experience and unbounded ignorance of parliamentary
forms. In the first flush of victory they cleared the Rand of its
indentured Chinese labour and carried out the settlement of South
Africa by a grant of self-government: to such an avalanche of power
the opposition could offer no resistance, and, so long as the
government effected its reforms by executive action, the reserve
of the old guard could not be brought up. It was when, with a
curiously negative passion for reversal, ministers tried to upset
the Taff Vale judgement and the Balfour education and licensing
acts that new legislation was needed; and to new legislation the
conservatives could offer an opposition to overcome the most
bloated of majorities. The Birrell education bill and the new
licensing bill were destroyed by the House of Lords; the trades
disputes bill, after hanging by the neck, was cut down before it
was dead. Of the three, this was the one most open to attack in
that it placed trades unions, in some respects, above the law; it
was allowed to pass, amid salvos of abuse, because the House of
Lords would not then risk a direct challenge to organized labour;
and this cynical opportunism discredited the Lords far more than
had their partial and reactionary assault on all bills submitted by
a liberal government.
Either of these rebuffs constituted, in the eyes of the party
stalwarts, an occasion for war; and those who remembered the
dismal policy of "filling up the cup" in the Gladstone-Rosebery
administration yearned for a short, sharp contest in which the
malevolence of the House of Lords should be fettered for all time.
Nevertheless, the memory of even a successful election is so
little alluring that the liberal majority of those days did not
wish to engage in a second: the politician of detached judgement
surmised that, when the Nationalists had secured special favours
for Catholics and when all parties had united to concede them to
the Jews, it was invidious to refuse similar treatment to the
Church of England. In rejecting the education bill, the House of
Lords aroused little practical hostility, however much its action
may have offended doctrinaire democrats; and so artificial was the
tattered passion aroused by the Balfour education act of 1902 that,
when it ceased to furnish platform capital, it was left to function
unmolested and is still operative after nearly twenty years.
Similarly, when the licensing bill was thrown out, the House of
Lords was so far from being reprobated by any but prohibitionists
and professional partisans that it even won the sympathy of the
average man by preventing an intolerable interference with his
personal habits and by securing to the threatened license-holder
his means of living. Some such reflections, occurring even to the
less detached politicians, disposed them to wait for a more certain
triumph than was promised by the half-hearted support accorded to
their rejected bills; an opportunity was provided by the budget of
1909; and Mr. Asquith's first general election of 1910 was fought
to reaffirm the hitherto long unquestioned control of finance by
the House of Commons.
If the new liberal majority was smaller and now dependent on the
nationalist vote, it was at least inspired by an unanalytical
admiration for its chief such as no prime minister had enjoyed
since the fanatical personality of Mr. Gladstone drew an equally
fanatical devotion from his followers. Personal shyness and
intellectual aloofness deprived Mr. Asquith of the love felt for
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman by all who came in contact with
him; he never pretended passionate enthusiasms nor roused in
others the passionate enthusiasm which caused Mr. Lloyd George
to be cheered through a division-lobby; he was never the sole
hero of a great bill as Mr. Lloyd George was the sole hero of
the 1909 budget; outside the House he never won the adoration
of the proletariat as Mr. Lloyd George won--and to some extent
kept--it by his Limehouse campaign; and, when fire was needed in
debate, Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Churchill was left to supply it.
Nevertheless, lack of temperament and limitation of heart were
compensated, in Mr. Asquith, by the unlimited ascendancy of his
head. Eloquent, emphatic, and unruffled, patient, experienced and
resourceful, the intellectual and dialectical superior of the
oldest parliamentarian in the House and the wisest tactician on
either side, a survivor from Mr. Gladstone's last cabinet and Mr.
Gladstone's most brilliant discovery, Mr. Asquith exacted, even
from those who resisted him in the Liberal League days, a blind
loyalty which carried him through four years of the hottest and
most unintermittent domestic fighting in English political history;
it carried him, with closed ranks, into the war and through nearly
two and a half years of the war, though many felt in their hearts
that, by the policy which made war possible, he had betrayed
liberalism and that, by the unheralded formation and dissolution
of the first coalition, he had betrayed the liberal party. After
the December crisis of 1916 the loyalty of his followers, with
their English love for an old, popular favourite, insisted that he
should still remain at their head; and, when he lost his seat in
1918, he retained his leadership. The general election in that year
extinguished his party; it was characteristic of the men he led and
of the leader they followed that, when all was lost but faith, they
set loyalty to their old chief above private and public interest.
II
From the budget crisis of 1909 until the party crisis of 1916
Mr. Asquith, as the Nestor first of his party and then of his
coalition, was by so much the most commanding figure in public
life that posterity seemed likely, in reading the history of those
years, to concentrate upon his name as exclusively as this age
concentrates on that of Mr. Pitt, while forgetting the names of his
lieutenants as completely as the casual reader in these days has
forgotten the names of Mr. Pitt's. Had he remained in office till
the armistice to enjoy the fruits of this early war-administration,
his fame would probably have transcended Mr. Pitt's, as the late
war transcended in magnitude the war against Napoleon; had he
resigned voluntarily, with every honour that could be bestowed
upon him, three months before the December downfall, he would have
shared with his successor whatever credit history may accord to
the political leaders in the war. The time and the manner of his
resignation dwarf his personality and his achievements before
those of Mr. Lloyd George as the achievements and personality
of Lord Aberdeen were dwarfed before those of Lord Palmerston.
"Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall
from power," writes the anonymous author of _The Mirrors of Downing
Street_; "it was as if a pin had dropped."
Seven years earlier he seemed to his supporters, inside the
House and out, a leader who could wrest a party victory from
the jaws of political death. Whoever unloosed the winds, it was
always Mr. Asquith who harnessed and rode them. Thus, Mr. Lloyd
George, confident that the House of Lords had, by constitutional
convention, no power to tamper with a money-bill, departed so
far from the traditional conception of the budget as a means of
balancing expenditure and revenue that the House of Lords was
threatened with loss of control over any measure which could be
shielded by a financial clause. It was a bold challenge, boldly
accepted; the House of Lords threw out the budget. No general
election could paralyse their powers more completely than the
device which the chancellor of the exchequer was seeking to
introduce. With equal boldness the prime minister followed up his
challenge by advising a dissolution.
Mr. Asquith's ministry was returned to power with authority to
piece together and carry its mutilated programme, though the
authority was by now so much diminished that the opposition
regarded itself and the country as lying at the mercy of a
small and tyrannous junto: had they voted by inclination, the
nationalists would have assailed the budget, but they gave their
support as a consideration for the later help of British liberals
who indeed called themselves home rulers, but were more interested
in other issues. From 1910 onwards log-rolling by groups became the
first condition of the government's existence; and, before ever the
House met, the whips' office was conscious of the change. Political
history from 1910 to 1914 is the record of the government's
attempts to meet its liabilities. The great bills were introduced:
home rule, Welsh disestablishment and electoral reform; they were
rejected, and the parliament bill was drafted to secure that these
and other bills, when passed by the House of Commons without change
in three consecutive sessions, automatically became law. There
was another election, keenly resented by those who regarded it as
unnecessary and complained that they had been misled by the prime
minister's Albert Hall speech; and Mr. Asquith was empowered to say
that, if the House of Lords rejected the parliament bill, new peers
would be created until the government had a majority; the bill
passed.
After less than ten years, many are forgetting the political
passions of those days. To a radical this contest was far the
greatest democratic victory since the first reform bill, and Mr.
Asquith, after nearly twenty years, seemed to be buckling on the
sword which Mr. Gladstone laid down when, in the last speech
delivered by him in the House of Commons, he warned his party of
the conflict which had been forced upon them: to an Irishman, it
was the promise of freedom and self-government. Nowhere could there
be found room for compromise, though the opposition saw only the
coming of mob-rule and confiscation, the betrayal of Ulster and the
spoliation of the church. It is small wonder if war was carried to
the knife and fork, if old friendships broke, as in the days of
the first home rule bill, and if stern, unbending tories stalked
disgustedly from drawing-rooms when ministers and their families
entered.
Many, too, are forgetting how closely fought was the contest.
Blood, it was boasted, would flow under Westminster Bridge before
the "backwoodsmen" gave way; the whips' office was reported to
have its lists ready, and new peers were to be created in batches
until their opponents abandoned the futile opposition; while the
final debate was taking place in the House of Lords, the first
commissioner was at work on the plans for converting Westminster
Hall into a chamber capable of seating the new creations. No one,
even as the last division took place, could predict confidently how
the votes would be cast.
The victory of the government brought to an end the greatest
constitutional struggle of a century. Henceforward the will of the
majority, expressed through its representatives in the House of
Commons and thrice affirmed, could no longer be withstood by the
House of Lords in its existing or in any reformed state; for the
second time in twenty years Ireland looked through an open door
at the vision of freedom. It may be that the war, in overturning
all political conditions, has caused the parliament act to be no
longer needed: the days of conflict between the two houses may
have passed away in 1914, and from the present disorder and sorrow
of Ireland may emerge a settlement not less enduring than was
foreshadowed in the third home rule bill; but, whether or not there
be one to mourn its death, all must recognise that the parliament
act is dead, and, unless its fruits are to be secured by other
means, it were better that it had never been born with its promise
of hope and its fulfilment of despair. If war with Germany was
inevitable--an hypothesis which increasing numbers find themselves
unable to accept--democracy and nationalism would have fared better
by its coming in 1911; if the act of God had displaced the liberal
ministers on the morrow of their victory, it would have been better
for their reputation and for the principles which they professed.
For a moment they and their redoubtable leader loomed big as any
of the greatest parliamentary figures in history; neither Canning
nor Grey, neither Palmerston nor Gladstone could shew a fairer
record of achievement in the long battle for democracy and the
untrammelled development of small nations.
It was only for a moment. Political history from the passing of
the parliament act is the history of liberalism in its decline
and fall. Were ministers exhausted by their effort? Were they
men who could only do a piece of work when it was forced upon
them? Among his great qualities it is doubtful whether the prime
minister could include enthusiasm, though he worked in office with
the mechanical efficiency and speed of a hard-pressed barrister;
it is certain that he could not be credited with imagination: the
Irish ideal and the Ulster ideal floated at an equal distance
above the practical head of a man who had been taught and trained
to distrust enthusiasm and to reject idealism. His biographer may
search through his speeches and writings for one hint of vision
or a single glimmer of sympathy with anything but material logic;
he might as profitably search through the sole published speech
of Gallio and the comment of his chronicler. Want of vision was
temporarily compensated by adroitness in escaping the consequences
of this defect. For the next five years, friends and enemies agreed
that there was no one to equal Mr. Asquith in his tactical retreat
from a crisis; the enemies added that, until a crisis arose,
he never exerted himself; the friends began to wonder whether
the highest statesmanship consisted in overcoming one crisis by
creating another, by exchanging an Irish crisis for a European
crisis until, in the final crisis of December 1916, when for the
last time he bade his followers choose between Nicias and Cleon, a
majority voted for any change from the long and precarious policy
of brilliant improvisations.
As an instrument of government, the liberal ministry declined
in power as its prestige declined; and its prestige suffered a
severe blow on the day when the public was informed that Mr. Lloyd
George, the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Rufus Isaacs, the
attorney-general, and the Master of Elibank, chief liberal whip,
had been buying American Marconi shares. The attorney-general's
brother was associated with the English company; and the more
credulous section of the public, never reluctant to learn or to
invent a scandal among the highly-placed, jumped to the conclusion
that ministers with access to information withheld from the public
had been speculating in stocks which their official position
enabled them to influence in their own favour. A widespread outcry
arose, a commission of enquiry was set up, ministers were examined
and the findings of the commissioners were published. As a cynic
observed at the time:
"The tories don't care a damn, but they have to pretend to be
shocked; the liberals are shocked, but they have to pretend not to
care a damn."
After weeks of excited recrimination, public interest gradually
cooled; the hostile press had to admit that there had been no
corruption, however injudiciously the ministers had behaved. The
episode might have been forgotten, the prestige of the government
might have recovered if a concession had been made to the virtuous
indignation of those who were shocked by the "scandal" and of those
who persuaded themselves that they were shocked; no prime minister
is strong enough to despise with impunity the suspicion that,
because he cannot afford to lose them, or because he is indifferent
to their offence, he is retaining colleagues for whose resignation
he should have asked. Too lofty of soul to regard the prejudices
of the vulgar and perhaps reluctant to present Mr. Lloyd George to
the labour party or to the radical wing of the ministerialists, the
government listened only to the dictates of logic and loyalty: if
the three ministers were innocent of dishonest purpose or practice,
they must not be persecuted; indiscretion was not a hanging
offence. The Master of Elibank soon afterwards abandoned political
life to take up, as Lord Murray of Elibank, a responsible position
with a firm of contractors; Sir Rufus Isaacs left the House of
Commons to become lord chief justice; Mr. Lloyd George remained
guardian of the public purse; and the less punctilious governments
of the world from Mexico to France warmed to a feeling of cordial
fellowship with methods which they seemed to recognise and with men
whom they seemed to understand.
This obedience to the findings of the commission was strictly
logical; and in refusing to be swayed by ignorant prejudice the
prime minister gave one more instance of his unfailing loyalty
to colleagues who, it cannot be said too often, were innocent of
all dishonesty. Nevertheless, in the mouths of weaker men there
lingered an unpleasant taste; and, if no one was seriously
surprised or hurt by the conduct of the principals, even the most
cynical member of parliament was offended by the unprotesting
tolerance of such men as Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, of whom
a more inflexible standard was expected. It was felt that, when a
speculating chancellor of the exchequer continued in office, it
must be because his chief was insensible to the undesirability of
such practises, or because he was too sensible of his lieutenant's
value as a vote-catcher; it was regretfully surmised that the prime
minister would throw a protecting mantle over his colleagues,
whatever they did, and that his colleagues could do what they liked
because the head of the government would never call for their
resignation.
The sense that the prime minister would only stir himself to use
his authority in a crisis encouraged a spirit of lawlessness which
in the years following led to active disorder and the threat of
civil war; secure in the belief that they were too valuable to
be dismissed and free from fear that the head of the government
would call them to order, his less temperate colleagues were
stimulated to a license of speech and to an independence of action
that threatened the solidity of cabinet rule and prepared the rift
which ultimately broke the party. These were the days when the
blood of Marlborough, warming in Mr. Winston Churchill's veins,
urged him to take personal part in a military campaign against
a couple of hooligans in the east end of London; they were the
days of Mr. Lloyd George's more finished Limehouse manner. And,
while it is fair to assume that the prime minister's intellectual
fastidiousness recoiled from this exuberance of action and speech,
he did nothing to dissociate himself from it publicly.
The same lethargy brooded over the beginning of every new crisis.
In addition to a long succession of labour troubles, occasionally
composed at the eleventh hour, but usually flourishing to the
general discomfort of the community at the thirteenth, ministers,
in their lofty refusal to be stampeded, allowed two incipient
rebellions against public order to reach a point of success and
determination at which one could put a pistol to the head of the
government and the other could demonstrate that the executive
lacked power to quell unruliness. During these years the agitation
in favour of female suffrage is only of interest in so far as
it encouraged the enemies of England in their belief that the
strength of the government was paralysed. The parliamentary vote
has now been conceded to women; Mr. Asquith, its most stalwart
antagonist, has seen that he mistook a prejudice for a principle
and has repaired his mistake. In the three years before the war,
however, he was not yet so well convinced of women's fitness to
govern that he would allow female suffrage to become a line of
party division. The suffragettes spoke and stormed, burnt and
broke; their adherents in the House of Commons were not numerous
enough to force a bill through; and the government was amply
justified in not lending support to a cause which had no certain
popular backing in the country.[19] But, if the time was not yet
ripe for a parliamentary contest, the executive had at least a duty
in maintaining public order. The weakness displayed by ministers
in handling this series of sporadic rebellions suggested to other
discontented parties in England, Ireland and Germany that ministers
were powerless to govern; a critic with any detachment wondered, in
spite of himself, why the English fancied that they had any genius
for self-government.
III
Salvation by violence, never a healthy doctrine to inculcate, was
peculiarly dangerous teaching for a section of the Irish who had
been told for almost thirty years that they would be justified in
offering forcible resistance to any attempt on the part of the
imperial parliament to press home rule upon them. When ministers
honoured their obligation to the nationalist party by whose votes
they had been kept in office since 1910, the Orangemen announced
that they would resist by force. Cynics in England may have been
amused, seekers after truth outside England must have been shocked
to find the Irish "loyalists"[20] threatening armed resistance to
an act which could only come into force on the authority of the
king of Great Britain and Ireland and of the imperial parliament;
if not shocked, even the avowed anarchist must have been surprised
to find the experiment in constructive treason blessed and headed
by the Right Honourable Sir Edward Carson, K.C., M.P., one time
a law-officer of the crown and a man committed by his privy
councillor's oath to loyalty towards his soveran. But these were
restless and unbalanced times, in which constitutionalism came to
be regarded as an outworn shibboleth: the bitter struggle over the
1909 budget, the two general elections within a single year and
the more bitter struggle over the parliament bill had familiarized
the people of Great Britain with a new violence of language,
of boast and of threat. The Ulster covenant and the Ulster
volunteers, appealing to the twin boyish love--in such men as Mr.
F. E. Smith, K.C., M.P.--of a secret society and of playing at
soldiers, afforded a new thrill to jaded spirits who were perhaps
disappointed that, though the parliament bill had passed, no blood
had flowed under Westminster Bridge.
Behind Sir Edward Carson stood a young Englishman in a hurry and a
Canadian, no longer young, who had been entrusted with the delicate
task of teaching the conservative party a newer and better style
of parliamentary opposition than Mr. Balfour had been able to
inculcate; the Irish problem united the three indissolubly, and for
present violence and later responsibility there is little to choose
between them.
"I could contribute," said Mr. F. E. Smith on 18.6.12, "very little
to the military efficiency of those who were resisting the Regular
Forces or the still more formidable invasion from the South,
_but_...."
"I can imagine," said Mr. Bonar Law, on 27.7.12, "no length of
resistance to which Ulster will go which I shall not be ready to
support."
"We will shortly challenge the Government," said Sir Edward Carson
on the same day. "They may tell us if they like that this is
treason. We are prepared to take the consequences."
"I do not care tuppence whether it is treason or not," proclaimed
Sir Edward Carson on 21.9.12.
"Supposing," Mr. F. E. Smith suggested on 25.9.12, "the Government
gave such an order, the consequences can only be described in the
words of Mr. Bonar Law, when he said, 'if they did so it would not
be a matter of argument, but the population of London would lynch
you on the lamp-posts.'"
"The Attorney-General," boasted Sir Edward Carson, himself an old
solicitor-general and a future attorney-general, on 11.10.12, "says
that my doctrines and the course I am taking lead to anarchy. Does
he not think I know that?"
"If you attempt to enforce this Bill ...," threatened Mr. Bonar Law
on 1.1.13, "I shall assist them in resisting it."
"We will set up a Government," announced Sir Edward Carson on
7.9.13. "I am told it will be illegal. Of course it will. Drilling
is illegal ... the Government dare not interfere."
"Ulster will do well to resist, and we will support her in her
resistance to the end," promised Mr. Bonar Law on 28.11.13.
"The red blood will flow," prophesied Sir Edward Carson on 17.1.14.
"To coerce Ulster ... no right to ask army to undertake," decided
Mr. Bonar Law. "Any officer who refuses is only doing his duty."
"The day I shall like best," said Sir Edward Carson on 20.6.14,
less than six weeks before the beginning of war with Germany, "is
the day upon which I am compelled, if I am compelled, to tell my
men, 'You must mobilize.'"
"If the occasion arises," Mr. Bonar Law undertook on 28.9.14, eight
weeks after war had broken out, "we shall support you to the last
in any steps which Sir Edward Carson and your leaders think it
necessary for you to take."[21]
While the leader of the unionist party, a former solicitor-general
and the rising hope of the spent and broken tories were restrained
from using language that could be borrowed by malcontents less
highly placed, their followers imposed less check on the unaffected
poetry of their natures.
"There is a spirit spreading abroad," declared Captain Craig
(_Morning Post_, 9.1.11[22]), "which I can testify to from my
personal knowledge that Germany and the German Emperor would be
preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford and the Molly
Maguires."
"If they were put out of the Union ...," proclaimed Major F.
Crawford, a Larne gun-runner, on 29.4.12, "he would infinitely
prefer to change his allegiance right over to the Emperor of
Germany or any one else who had got a proper and stable government."
And even Mr. Bonar Law ventured to state, even in the House of
Commons, on 1.1.13:
"It is a fact which I do not think any one who knows anything about
Ireland will deny, that these people in the North-East of Ireland,
from old prejudices perhaps more than from anything else, from the
whole of their past history, would prefer, I believe, to accept the
government of a foreign country rather than submit to be governed
by hon. gentlemen below the gangway."
"It may not be known to the rank and file of Unionists," announced
_The Irish Churchman_ on 14.11.13, "that we have the offer of aid
from a powerful continental monarch who, if Home Rule is forced on
the Protestants of Ireland, is prepared to send an army sufficient
to release England of any further trouble in Ireland by attaching
it to his dominion, believing, as he does, that if our king breaks
his coronation oath by signing the Home Rule Bill he will, by so
doing, have forfeited his claim to rule Ireland. And should our
king sign the Home Rule Bill, the Protestants of Ireland will
welcome this continental deliverer as their forefathers, under
similar circumstances, did once before."
Since the consequences of their menace have been observed in
the desolation of a hundred million homes throughout the world,
Orangemen have not dwelt with pride on this aspect of their
campaign; and, even at the time when the last threat was uttered,
the more temperate souls felt that the controversy was being
pushed beyond the limit of fair government-baiting. Weapons of an
older type were brought into play: Ulstermen, who of all dour,
independent races can best look after themselves, were depicted as
the future spiritual and financial victims of "Rome rule"; and of
the plea that Ulster only wished to remain a part of Great Britain
and Ireland much was made by controversialists who would not
consent to be governed for a day, had the tables been turned, by an
insignificant minority of Ulster nationalists, backed by political
sympathizers in another country.
With the thunder of opposing oratory mingled the rattle of
grounding arms and the tramp of marching feet; but, though the
Orangemen warned the government that the Ulster rebels were too
much in earnest to be disregarded, ministers were by now grown
indifferent to the bluff of their enemies, the counsel of the
disinterested and the public insults which highly-placed ladies
showered upon them with impunity at court and in private houses.
Whether the anarchy and treason, preached and admitted by Sir
Edward Carson, would ever have flamed into civil war is a matter of
guess-work. The nationalist leaders, rightly or wrongly, thought
that it would not; the prime minister who afterwards discounted
the strength of nationalist idealism from August, 1914, until the
Easter rising was unlikely to give its true value, whatever that
might be, to the strength of unionist idealism two years before;
by now, moreover, he was too well used to actual crises to be
alarmed by a crisis which had not yet arisen. Mr. Birrell, the
chief secretary, was too busily engaged in concealing his defects
as an administrator under his brilliance as an epigrammatist to
supply the imagination that his leader lacked. No attempt was made
to scotch the rebellion or bring the ringleaders to book; enrolment
increased, drilling continued, arms were purchased and imported. In
the spring of 1914 some uneasiness made itself felt in the bosom of
Colonel Seely, the secretary of state for war, and a confidential
question directed to the loyalty of the troops stationed at the
Curragh elicited that a number of officers, holding the king's
commission, would refuse to obey orders if commanded to proceed
against the Ulster rebels.
Though it was still a matter of guess-work whether the Orangemen
would rise, no one could doubt that, in the event of a rising,
there would be difficulty in making the army obey its orders. No
less a person than the leader of the opposition had said that the
officer who refused would only be doing his duty. For a few hours
the House of Commons tried heatedly to assert itself against this
attempt to establish a military ascendancy over parliament; the
tail wagged and came near to lashing the dog; but the creation of
a crisis created with it an opportunity for the prime minister
to shew his adroitness in overcoming crises; Colonel Seely
resigned, and Mr. Asquith undertook the administration of the War
Office, thereby surprising the Curragh and the House of Commons
so completely that the revolts in both places flickered out. The
government, however, had only escaped from one difficulty by
plunging into a greater; ministers, at last realising that Ulster
must be coerced or conciliated and that Sir Edward Carson, relying
on his volunteers, was pressing them harder than Mr. Redmond, who
could only rely on a government's honour, decided to conciliate.
It was announced that the home rule scheme must be amended; a
conference was summoned; the Orangemen were comforted by a promise
that the home rule act would not be enforced without an amending
act; and ministers committed themselves to a formula which has
become an accession-oath to succeeding administrations: Ulster must
not be coerced. To a liberal, the idea of coercion is so hateful
that he welcomes any declaration which undertakes to circumscribe
its tyranny; if it has to be applied, he would sooner see one man
in bonds and three at large than one at large and three in bonds;
but the liberal loathing of oppression, as expressed by Mr. Asquith
and Mr. Lloyd George, seems to have been confined to onehalf of one
province of Ireland. To the tortured and distracted other three
provinces their process of thought has never been satisfactorily
explained.
In the venerable story of an international gathering which was set
to write an essay on the elephant, it will be remembered that,
while the Englishman wrote on "Elephant-Hunting" and the Frenchman
on "The Love-Affairs of the Elephant", it was a German who evolved
an elephant out of his inner consciousness and a Pole who devoted
himself to "The Elephant in Relation to the Polish Question." For
a subject-nation to be obsessed by concern for its nationality is
perhaps tiresome to others; not to be so obsessed is despicable;
and the Irishman and the Pole have at least escaped the degradation
of a deracialised Jew. None the less, though nationality be the
first, it is not the only concern; and even an Irishman may have
felt, during these years, that Irish independence was being
purchased at the cost of a liberalism that was not confined by
national bounds. Political science has changed so little in two
thousand years that, whatever the origin of the state, it now
exists primarily, as it existed in the days of Aristotle, to
make life possible: the personal safety of the individual must
be assured and he must be guaranteed the essentials of living.
On this foundation there rises now, as in the days of Aristotle,
the second law, which alone separates an assembly of men from a
pack of wolves, that the state exists to make possible a life of
excellence; the individual must be afforded a chance of living a
nobler life. Despite sporadic crime and external war, the first
condition of safety was satisfied in England; and, though death by
starvation was not unknown, the existence of work-houses testified
that none need starve. Because the second condition is still so far
from being fulfilled and because the chance of living a noble life
is confined to an infinitesimal handful of the population, a party
pledged to social reform came into existence and will justify its
existence so long as oppression or fear of oppression, injustice,
insecurity, disease, ignorance, poverty and squalor remain to
be removed. It was the business of liberalism to remove these
handicaps.
How far did it succeed? The violence of political controversy
in those days hid from most observers how little was being done
to improve the lot of man, woman or child in England. After the
passion for reversing the legislation of their predecessors had
run its course, ministers did indeed carry a courageous measure of
old-age pensions; their insurance act was generous in intention
even if it was unneeded and ineffectual in practise; and the
parliament act created a procedure for expediting social reform in
the future. But how much else did they find time to achieve in the
intervals of the constitutional crisis and of the unending clash
over Ireland?
While they wrangled, the possibility of a noble life was brought
no nearer. Hundreds of thousands were insufficiently fed, ill-clad
and verminous, with insufficient air, light and warmth; millions
were corrupt with phthisis, cancer or venereal disease. On these
physical wrecks and starvelings education left little mark; and a
century of labour combination and industrial legislation had not
laid that spectre of unemployment which stunts the soul and turns
cold the heart of even the healthiest and most independent when
they live within sight of the margin of subsistence. Day after day
the opportunity of noble living was withdrawn from the thousands
of women who through moral weakness, poverty, indolence or greed
were pressed as recruits to prostitution; it was withdrawn from the
homes that were ruined by drink and gambling. The shadow cast by
the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of modern civilisation
was so dense that there still existed in England, in the twentieth
century, private societies to preserve animals and children from
being tortured.
From time to time a sudden attack was made on the trade in
human bodies and souls known by timid English euphemism as "the
white-slave traffic"; the criminal law was amended and made more
vigorous; the defencelessness of children was recognised and
safeguarded. For what they were worth, let all credit be given to
these gingerly attempts to heal unsightly sores, provided that no
one mistake part cure for complete prevention. A prison flogging
may deter the pander from dealing in human flesh, but it does not
dispose him to noble living for its own sake; this is begotten of
a sense of beauty by education. During these years a cartoon by
Max Beerbohm depicted Lord Lansdowne trying, with all the amenity
of his kind, to understand just what Mr. H. G. Wells meant by the
barrenness of official politics; the successive education bills
of the liberal administration sacrificed the elementals of good
citizenship to an ingenious game of protecting church of England
children from the perils of religious instruction in the tenets of
dissent; and whether in after life a man starved his children or
lived on the hire of his wife's body mattered less than that for
the first twelve years of existence a unitarian should be secured
from believing or even understanding that God was Three-in-One and
One-in-Three.
While only those who are equally ignorant of politics and of
history imagine that the party system can be ended without a change
in all the practises of English representative government, it is
unquestionable that the sometimes artificial antagonism of two
parties set eternally in opposition to each other causes undue
importance to be attached to politics on their tactical side; the
content is sacrificed to the form. If man's hope of noble living
went unstrengthened in the years from 1906 to 1914, this was
because the trustees of the nation were too busy squabbling for
possession of the machine.
IV
Throughout July, 1914, all parties were working industriously
to amend the home rule bill in such a way as to compensate the
"ascendancy" party for the loss of its ascendancy. That solution
had not been discovered when war broke out. To present a united
front in face of the enemy, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar Law
patriotically promised the prime minister their support in this
latest crisis; the prime minister, not to be outdone in patriotism,
undertook to postpone controversial legislation for the duration
of the war. The contentious bills were left to hibernate in the
statute-book; the constitutionalists in Ireland were left to
compare the failure of constitutionalism with the success of
treason; and the political historian observed that, once more, the
major crisis had saved the government from the consequences of the
minor.
Unhappily, as controversial legislation was only postponed, so the
consequences of this surrender to rebellion were only postponed;
more unhappily still, they were not postponed for so long. Certain
lessons were learned in the years from 1911 to 1914; and they have
not been forgotten.
First, the government, as the suffragettes and Orangemen had
shewn, could be bullied; it either would not or could not keep
order. And for more than two years it was bullied by strikers,
conscriptionists, "war groups", newspaper proprietors and those
who wished for a coalition; it was bullied in open session and in
secret session by private members, ex-ministers and commissions of
enquiry.
Secondly, officers of the British army could refuse to obey orders
if commanded to suppress a political agitation with which they
might sympathise; it was not made clear by the army council that
privates had the same freedom if commanded to suppress a labour
agitation with which they might sympathise.
Thirdly, a privy councillor might, with impunity, preach armed
resistance to a law, though the result of his preaching were local
bloodshed or a general war; Sir Roger Casement might not practice
armed resistance in protest against the suspension of that law.
Fourthly, the word of a British minister could no longer be
accepted. A political bargain is as binding as any other; and since
1910 the government had depended on nationalist support of which
the price was the home rule bill. When pressure was applied, the
government refused to honour its bargain; payment was to be made
on new conditions and in debased coinage. It is instructive to
read the list of those who acquiesced in this surrender, for the
dishonour of the prime minister was shared by all of his colleagues
and supporters who consented to the act of betrayal: they are
English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Jewish and hybrid, so that the
disgrace is not confined to a single nationality; they are men who
probably pay their tradesmen, certainly their opponents at bridge.
And many of them made eloquent speeches of righteous indignation
when the Imperial German government abrogated the Belgian and
Luxemburg treaties. In Ireland to this day and for many years to
come there is not a man, woman or child who will take the British
government seriously. For defence it is urged that, if the home
rule act had been enforced in 1914, there would have been civil
war in Ulster; temporary peace was bought at the price of civil
war throughout the rest of Ireland from the Easter rising onwards,
as the rest of Ireland learned from British ministers and from
Sir Edward Carson that "the great questions of the time are to
be decided not by speeches and votes of majorities but by blood
and iron." Faced with this choice of evils, it was unfortunate
that ministers selected the alternative which carried with it the
repudiation of their own bond.
As the unconstructive critic is no less irritating and no more
helpful than a howling child, the Irish policy of the liberal
government may only be attacked by those who are prepared to
suggest an alternative. The present first essential is that the
imperial parliament should reestablish in Ireland a belief in
its own good-faith; the second, that, as nationalist history has
advanced rapidly since 1914, the Irish should be given a measure
of independence relatively as great as that promised to them in
the third home rule act; the third, that they should determine its
form for themselves. All Ireland should be divided into electoral
areas to choose a constituent assembly which would contain Ulster
Protestants, Ulster Catholics, Southern Protestants, Southern
Catholics and Sinn Feiners (who can enter no conference so long
as there is a price on their heads). When a two-thirds majority
of this constituent assembly has agreed upon a constitution, the
imperial parliament should undertake to enforce it, if necessary by
arms, whatever its form and without favour for any recalcitrants;
and every section of parliament should pledge itself, jointly and
severally, to this. The minds of those who are disturbed by talk
of an Irish republic may be soothed if the word "commonwealth,"
sufficiently honoured in other parts of the world, be substituted.
Those who see in Ireland a base of attack on England in a future
war are not entitled to be heard until they have stated (1) what
war they anticipate; (2) where Ireland is to find the money to
build a fleet or to equip an army, and (3) how, in any war, Ireland
is more immune from the supervision of the British navy than are
France, Belgium and Holland.
Until Ireland has been pacified, the reciprocal murdering and
incendiarism of this new Thirty Years' War will continue, at
the lowest, to hinder succeeding governments in their task of
reconstruction after the war, as the unsettled Irish problem
hindered the task of social amelioration which had been entrusted
to the liberal government in 1906. Month by month, as the shadow
of Ireland advanced farther into British politics, the authority
and usefulness of a great reforming party receded; and, at the
end, the bruised, the broken-hearted and the disillusionised
agreed that, if the liberal ministry which the genius of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman had contrived and which the biggest liberal
majority in history supported so long and faithfully could have
been caught up to heaven on the morrow of the parliament act, every
liberal would have said: "_Felix opportunitate mortis_."
The outbreak of war marked the death of liberalism. Freedom of
speech was curtailed and suppressed until one scrupulous patriot
asked in the House of Commons whether the Sermon on the Mount
should not be regarded as subversive of military discipline;
freedom of action was drowned by a wave of collective hysteria
in which governors and governed vied with one another to impose
new burdens and to bend submissive and welcoming necks to receive
them. The theory of representative government, shaken to its
foundations when a House of Commons which had been elected to
carry the parliament bill engaged--as a parergon--in a European
war, was finally destroyed when conscription was imposed without
election or referendum. The lusty growth of autocracy soon choked
such sickly flowers of liberalism as a care for the rights of
minorities and a concern for the pleadings of conscience; though
a moment's reflection would have shewn that, if Christianity is
persistently thrust down the throats of all English children, a few
will almost certainly accept it literally, those who looked for
no qualifications to the injunction that a man must not kill were
quickly taught that Christianity was not a practicable creed for
times of war; and a country which prided itself on a traditional
love of fair play first reviled and then persecuted conscientious
objectors with so little discrimination that, when one Quaker
who had acted as a stretcher-bearer received the Mons medal, he
could only wear it in the prison to which he had been confined for
refusing to undertake military service.
Whenever, in the first two years of the war, an article of liberal
faith came in conflict with the heterogeneous policy of a coalition
government, the article of faith was thrust aside. The resolutions
of the Paris economic conference committed Great Britain to a
tariff war with her enemies; the treaty of London converted a
war which had been undertaken to satisfy British obligations to
Belgium into an imperialist war in which the present and future
allies of Great Britain were invited to help themselves at the
expense of their neighbours; gradually there was heard less talk
of a crusade on behalf of small nationalities, and the liberal
party committed itself to a "knock-out blow". So committed, it
could neither utter nor listen to proposals which involved less
than unconditional surrender; and, though Belgian neutrality might
perhaps have been vindicated and reparation secured before the war
had run half its ultimate course, the imperialist policy in which
liberalism acquiesced allowed of no check to hostilities until
Europe was exhausted and revolution had been unloosed in Russia, to
spread no man knows whither. The peace party in English politics
finally assented to a settlement of which any militarist in France
or Prussia would have been proud to acknowledge the authorship.
It was not to be expected that any set of political principles
could remain unchanged by war, though liberalism would have been
less violently mutilated if it had appealed to the heart rather
than to the head of liberal leaders. How far their foreign policy
contributed to the war which destroyed liberalism must be discussed
later.