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.
