While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

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.