I
"England has had her Long Parliament and her Short Parliament. On my soul, George, I don't know that this won't deserve to be called the 'Mad Parliament.'"
The speaker was my uncle, the time a few weeks after the beginning of the 1906 Session, the place a corner-seat below the gangway. We had survived the oratorical flood of the debate on the Address and were settling down to work. The giant Liberal majority, "independent of the Irish," as we used to boast in those days, but discreetly respectful to the disturbingly large Labour contingent, was finding its sea-legs; new members no longer prefaced their exordia with a "Mister Chairman and Gentlemen," and the lies and counter-lies of the Election, the sectional mandates from the electors and the specific pledges to constituents were gradually ceasing to be rehearsed in public. We passed crushing votes of confidence in the Free Trade system, arranged the evacuation of the Rand by the Chinese coolies, ascertained that the parliamentary draughtsmen were wasting no time over our Education and Licensing Bills,—and lay back with a yawn to luxuriate in our own strength, and dream of the new England we were calling into existence.
For a time our work was negative. After twenty years of misrule we had to cleanse the country before we could begin our inspired task, and in those early weeks I voted correctly and spent the rest of my day looking round me and attempting to memorize the new faces. The Treasury Bench needed no learning. I had met some of the Ministers in Princes Gardens and knew the rest by sight, but I gazed at it more than at any other part of the House—in a spirit of hero-worship, I suppose, on being brought into working partnership with men I had idealized for fifteen years.
In ability it was a great Ministry, and after nearly ten years I have much the same feeling for its leading members as before: the same love for 'C.-B.,' most human, diplomatic and forgiving of men; the same reverence for the aloof, austere Sir Edward Grey with his Bunyanesque Saxon speech and aura of Arthurian romance; the same admiration for the boundless intellectual efficiency of Mr. Haldane and Mr. Asquith; and the same delighted uncertainty in watching the volatile, lambent fire of Mr. Lloyd George's genius. In the delicate work of Cabinet-making, the deft fingers of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman hardly slipped, and to a Liberal Leaguer like myself the result was a brilliant compromise. The head and legs, the Prime Minister and the lesser office-holders, were Radicals of the Dispersion; the body was made up of Liberal Imperialists who, by sheer weight of intellect and personal authority, might be expected to control the movements of the extremities.
Yet, when the history of the 1906 Parliament comes to be written, the one thing stranger than the capture of the Cabinet by the Liberal League will be the capture of the Liberal League by the unofficial members. The House was overwhelmingly Radical and Nonconformist: it closed its ears to the wider Imperialism, and in 'Liberal League' saw but 'Whig Party' writ large. The result was hardly fortunate. Rather than surrender principle or power, the Whigs went to work underground, systematically corrupting the Radical majority in the House in the brief intervals of misleading the Radical majority in the Cabinet. Perhaps it was invincible necessity that demanded it, perhaps the Whig section showed the higher statesmanship in committing Democracy to a course it might not have taken without blinkers. I say no more than that it was unfortunate in its effect on the House and precarious as a policy on which life and death depended. Which Ministers knew what they were fighting for or against in the Big-and-Little-Navy struggle? Would the House have yawned so impatiently through the Army debates and the formation of the Expeditionary Force if it had known the Government's continental engagements? Was it safe to assume that a great pacific party would declare war within a few hours of learning the promises made in its name?
It was dangerous, but my purpose is not to arraign Ministers. Their double life is now only of interest to me as explaining in some measure the sterility of that monster majority at which I gazed in exultant wonder during my first session, explaining, too, the failure of that Mad Parliament which looked on life through the rose-tinted sunset haze of a "Back-to-the-Land" campaign and concentrated all political justice within the outer cover of a Plural Voting Bill. By counting heads, we were so powerful—and we did so little for all the Utopias we foreshadowed in our pulsing perorations.
"A Mad Parliament, George," my uncle repeated, "but a devilish funny one. We're made all ready to reverse the Tory measures of the last four or five years. Now, if you watch, you'll see the poor relations coming hat in hand to the mandarins."
I watched for some time, inside the House and out; watched and saw the Nationalists—hardly hat in hand—rejecting the Irish Councils Bill and calling for payment in Home Rule currency. I saw the Labour Party fed first with the Trades Disputes Bill, then with the provision for payment of members; and I saw the Welsh mollified with a promise of Disestablishment. It was to everybody's advantage that the Government should not be wound up till the preference shareholders had been paid, and as the last half-year's interest became due the commercial travellers of the Cabinet started on the road with social reform samples—old age pensions, land taxation, small holdings and insurance. The Radical Ministers were good salesmen and did a roaring trade; the country settled down to a riot of social legislation; the very board of Whig directors caught something of the infectious enthusiasm, and, as it was too late to talk of foreign debenture holders, the least they could do was to increase their outlay to attract new customers.
There was tragi-comedy in the spectacle, for the board and its travellers never worked in harmony, and neither section of supporters was satisfied. There was no attempt at comprehensive, imaginative social reconstruction—nothing but successive sops of clamorous minorities. Of my Thursday Club programme—with its Poor Law and Housing Reforms, its Secular Education and Federal Parliament, above all with its determined attempts to solve the Wage Problem and free the industrial system from the scandal and crime of strikes and lock-outs, not one item was achieved. Not one item had a chance of being achieved when the contest with the Lords was postponed beyond the rejection of the first Liberal Bill. But the debts had not then been paid. Street hoardings still bore tattered remnants of fluttering election posters, the Liberals had been out of office for half a generation, and the Whig foreign policy was barely begun.
So the party shirked the election, its groups scrambled for favours from the Government, and Ministers talked social reform, universal brotherhood and a "naval holiday" to a House they were afraid to take into their confidence. The 1906 Parliament might have produced a social programme or a foreign policy with the backing its conditions necessitated. It did neither. No one troubled to educate new members or organize the party. It was chiefly, I think, the number of groups, the strangeness of their visions and their common failure to recognize the impossible in politics, that moved my uncle to speak of the Mad Parliament. I am not so vain as to think the "Thursday Programme" wrote the last word in political science; I do claim, however, that as a piece of co-ordinated, imaginative thinking it treated the State as a whole, not as a bundle of warring sections to be divided and ruled, bribed and silenced. It attempted to bring the machinery of government into line with twentieth-century requirements. It tried to carry out, at leisure and in a spirit of reason, the structural changes that will have to be hurriedly improvised after the war.
By the time I had learned the names and constituencies of two-thirds of the members I had begun to notice how individuals agglomerated in the Smoking-Room and lobbies. The only characteristic common to every group was that it imagined itself the apostle of an exclusive salvation. The "Thursday Party" was reproduced a dozen times over, and, in looking back sadly on the futility of all our empty dreams, I feel that the Whips' Office must be held responsible for wasting the greatest opportunity of reform since the French Revolution. So long as we voted obediently, nothing mattered. We were never welded into a party, never educated politically; and the waste of enthusiasm was hardly less criminal than the waste of talent.
I can speak impersonally in this matter, for no one dreamed of thinking me fit for the most insignificant office—myself least of all; but there was no justification for ignoring great commercial organizers like Barrow, Trentley, Justman and half a dozen more—men whose ability had been proved time and again—and farming out under-secretaryships to fashionable barristers like Turkinson or scions of great houses like Cheely-Wickham. One of the first groups I distinguished was that of the middle-aged successful business men for whom no use could be found save as units in a division.
Another and a sadder was the largest in the House—the stalwarts, the 'sound party men.' Under present conditions no Government could live without them; they know it, and in that knowledge find two-thirds of their reward. The remainder comes by way of knighthoods—after a year or two of power it was impossible to walk through the lobby without being jostled by knights—occasionally by a Privy Councillorship and always by a sense of personal importance. How they loved to repeat what the Prime Minister had said to them—man to man! How infallible was the Liberal Ministry, whatever its inconsistencies! How treacherous their opponents! The Liberal rank and filer, I suppose, is no more stupid than his counterpart on the other side, but he is as depressing in conversation as might be expected of a man unoriginal in thought and uncritical in mind, whose supreme function is vehemently to propagate the imperfectly grasped ideas of others. I require no more loyal supporter than the Right Honourable Harry Marshall-James or the hundred men who are Marshall-James in everything but name; but I am not likely to find a man more pompous of manner and mediocre of mind.
And he is one of inimitably many, for the Ministry discouraged ability outside the Treasury Bench, finding distant appointments for the men it could not swallow at home. "No Army," as Jellaby, one of the Junior Whips, told me, "can be composed entirely of field-marshals." In his place I should have said the same thing: undoubtedly the same thought was felt, if never expressed, in the Nationalist party, so alien in spirit that I never knew the half of its members' names.
"I've sat opposite or alongside them many years," said my uncle reflectively. "I've seen the hair of so many of them turn gradually whiter. Some of them are elderly men, George; if Home Rule doesn't come in their time.... And there are still people who call them paid agitators; the Sinn Fein party still pretends they're prolonging the agony in order to keep their job. Ye gods! how sick of it all they must be! There are men on those benches—barristers and writers—who could have made the world their own. What d'you suppose they wouldn't give now to have their youth back—and their youth's opportunities? You may live to see the tragedy repeated with Labour."
He pointed with his finger to a group of three men high up on a back bench—Dillworth, Champion and Tomlin. I had heard the first two in the debate on the Address, and the last I was to hear many times before I left the House. They represented the Socialist State, and for passion, logic and incorruptibility ran the Nationalists close. As the Session aged, nine-tenths of the new members were unconsciously affected by the moral atmosphere of the House; compromise dulled the fine edge of our convictions, our constant close proximity to the Opposition mellowed our spirit; and a recognition of personal traits, the utterance of feeble, obscure, friendly jokes induced the belief that our worst enemy was fool rather than knave. The intransigeant Socialists kept their souls untainted by compromise; for them there was no dealing with Liberal or Conservative, and, when Tomlin spoke on Labour questions, you could imagine a Socialist foot-rule in his hand by which every reform was to be measured.
I disapprove the Socialist State he expounded, I dispute his premises and charge him with possessing the same excessive logic which led primitive ascetics to inch-by-inch suicide or drove doctrinaires of the French Revolution to destroy church spires in the interests of Republican equality. But I admire his passion of soul and intensity of vision; I recognize that his group of idealogues at least appreciated that the perfect State presupposes an all-embracing social philosophy.
There are few more moving sights than a preacher without a congregation, or with one that is incapable of understanding. St. Francis of Assisi won warmer response from his birds than Campion or Dillworth from the 1906 Parliament. Their audience numbered too many barristers, and the Bar has never been famous for its imagination or sympathy. Socialism, as offered by Campion and accepted by, say, Robert Plumer, K.C., suggested the form that the Sermon on the Mount might assume in the hands of an efficient parliamentary draughtsman. The Socialists were not slow to appraise their critics, and I sometimes think a great part of the later industrial troubles rose from a belief that laws and agreements were framed by skilled hair-splitters for the confusion of trusting manual workers.
The belief was fostered by the Press and a generous use of the "lawyer-politician" catchword. I have never been associated with the law, but I had opportunities of studying my legal colleagues in bulk, and a sillier phrase never obsessed the mind of a considerable people. Granted that the Bar was of arid, unimaginative temper, granted that it invaded the House for what the House could give it, may not the same charge be brought against seven-tenths of the non-legal members? And pressmen and barristers alone seem to enjoy the faculty of assimilating huge masses of strange matter in short time.
The Bar in Parliament appeared at its worst, not in the Chamber but in the Smoking-Room. I remember my uncle taking me aside after my election and counselling me as though I were a younger brother going to school for the first time. I was to sit tight until I had learned the procedure of the House, and after that—well, any man of average intelligence who wore out his patience and his trousers for ten years would be in the Ministry at the end. I was to put parliament before everything else and shed any idea that I could write novels between divisions, or contribute to the Press, or live with one foot in the House and the other in Mayfair. I was to cultivate the personal touch and read Ronsard for the pleasure of quoting him to Mr. Windham. But first and last and all the while I was to avoid the Smoking-Room.
"It's the grave of young reputations, George," he told me one day when we were seated there in a corner consecrated immemorially to his private use. "You sit and talk about what you're going to do, you discuss your neighbors,—this comes well from me, I know, but I'm an old sinner with a wasted life, and you're still a boy,—you shuffle jobs and appointments everlastingly, and in the meantime Ministers never see you, you learn nothing and you're always a day late for your opportunities. Remember that there's never any warning in the House, George. You'll get a dozen chances of winning your spurs, but only by sitting, sitting, sitting in your place when other people have gone away to dinner. Leave the Smoking-Room alone, my boy."
So for one session I followed his advice. After two hours in the "grave of young reputations" I returned to my corner seat, leaving a knot of barristers to cast lots for the vacant Harleyridge recordership, leaving my uncle, too, to watch the great movement of men. My sense of duty was so shortlived that I may be pardoned for dwelling on it and saying that the Smoking-Room is the most interesting place in the House. A year or two later, when I appreciated the wonderful mandarinesque inaccessibility of the Cabinet and saw how little the private member was wanted anywhere but in the division lobbies, I hurried away to places where at the least a man could smoke and talk.
The change was not ennobling but it gave infinitely more varied food for thought. I watched the social levelling-up of Radicalism and saw stern, unbending Nonconformists honoured and decorated for all the world like Tory supporters of the Establishment. At one time Baxter-Whittingham, looking strangely like a famished undertaker in his loose, half-clerical clothes, had criticized the Government as persistently as Campion or Dillworth; his mind stored with the memory of working-class conditions in Shadwell, his voice throbbing with indignation and pity, he had arraigned a Ministry that wasted days on the Address and hours on the obsolete circumlocutions of "Honourable and gallant members," "Mr. Speaker, I venture to say—and I do not think the most captious critic will contradict me ...," while men starved and women trod the path of shame, while little children went barefoot and verminous.
The silent fortitude of the Treasury Bench under his attacks was a thing to mark and remember. "It amuses him and doesn't hurt us," said my friend Jellaby, the Whip. "So long as he votes...." And Baxter-Whittingham never divided the House against the Government. Once when the Feeding of School Children Bill was in Committee he became dangerous: the Treasury Bench was deserted, and he lavished fine irony on the Ministerial passion for reform. Free-lances and others who had entrusted their social consciences to Whittingham, or were nettled by the intolerable aloofness of Ministers, followed in the same strain, and an excited Whip drove me out of the tea-room and bade me hold myself in readiness for trouble.
The following day the smoking-room presented a strange appearance. Seven members of the Cabinet and four lesser Ministers mingled with the common herd—like naughty schoolboys propitiating a ruffled master. They cracked jokes and slapped us on the back, bade us take pot-luck with them, and asked how things were looking in our constituencies. I lunched with a Secretary of State that day and, to redress the balance, kept my promise to dine with Sir Gerald Matley, the Wesleyan potter and Liberal knight. We were given a wonderful dinner, starting with caviar and ending with cigars like office-rulers, which we were urged to pocket, six at a time, to smoke on the way home. Flushed and rebellious, Philip drunk swore to move the adjournment unless he got a promise of warmer support for the School Children Bill. Philip sober was a shade less valiant. Matley and I, alone of that heroic cave, kept to our undertaking, and our fellow-braves avoided the House for a couple of days. The Treasury Bench smiled a little contemptuously as we proceeded to the Orders of the Day, but the lesson was not entirely thrown away. When the Minimum Wage Appeal Board was set up, Baxter-Whittingham (and who more fit?) was appointed Controller at a salary of £1250 a year, and Shadwell and the House of Commons knew him no more.
"Parliament before everything else," my uncle had said. With debates and committees, dinners and intrigues, great Liberal receptions and levees, I had time for nothing else. No schoolboy counted the days to the end of term more eagerly than I did as we came in sight of August.