Edinburgh, November 15, 1907
I am greatly reassured by the very kind reception which you have just given me. To tell the truth, I had been feeling a little alarmed at the fate which might await me in Edinburgh. From a faithful perusal of the Radical Press I had been led to believe that Scotland was seething with righteous indignation against that branch of the Legislature of which I am, it is true, only a humble and very recent member, but yet a member, and therefore involved in the general condemnation of the ruthless hereditary tyrants and oppressors of the people, the privileged landowning class, which is alleged to be so out of sympathy with the mass of their fellow-countrymen, although, oddly enough, it supplies many of the most popular candidates, not only of one party, at any General Election. Personally, I feel it rather hard to be painted in such black colours. There is no taint of hereditary privilege about me. I am not—I wish I were—the owner of broad acres, and I am in no way conscious of belonging to a specially favoured class. There are a great many of my fellow members in the House of Lords who are in the same position, and who sit there, not by virtue of any privilege, but by virtue of their services, or, let me say in my own case, supposed services, to the State. And while we sit there—and here I venture, with all humility, to speak for all the members of that body, whether hereditary or created—we feel that we ought to deal with the questions submitted to us to the best of our judgment and conscience, without fear of the consequences to ourselves and without allowing ourselves to be brow-beaten for not being different from what we are. We believe that we perform a useful and necessary function. We believe that a Second Chamber is essential to the good government of this country. We do not contend—certainly I am myself very far from contending—that the existing Second Chamber is the best imaginable. Let there be a well-considered reform of the House of Lords, or even, if need be, an entirely different Second Chamber. But until you have got this better instrument, do not throw away the instrument which you have—the only defence, not of the privileges of a class, but of the rights of the whole nation, against hasty, ill-considered measures and against the subordination of permanent national interests to the temporary exigencies of a party.
It is said that there is a permanent Conservative majority in the House of Lords. But then every Second Chamber is, and ought to be, conservative in temper. It exists to exercise a restraining influence, to ensure that great changes shall not be made in fundamental institutions except by the deliberate will of the nation, and not as the outcome of a mere passing mood. And if the accusation is, that the House of Lords is too Conservative in a party sense, which is a different thing, I admit, from being Conservative in the highest and best sense, that points not to doing away with the Second Chamber, but to making such a change in its composition as, while leaving it still powerful, still, above all, independent, will render it more representative of the permanent mind of the nation.
But let me be permitted to observe that the instance relied on to prove that the House of Lords is in the pocket of the Conservative party is a very unfortunate instance. What is its offence? It is said that the Lords rejected the Scottish Land Bill. But they did not reject the Scottish Land Bill. They were quite prepared to accept a portion of the Bill, and it is for the Government to answer to the people interested in that portion for their not having received the benefits which the Bill was presumably intended to bestow on them. What the Government did was to hold a pistol at the head of the House of Lords, and to say that they must either accept the whole straggling and ill-constructed measure as it stood, or be held up to public odium for rejecting it. But when the Bill was looked at as a whole, it was found to contain principles—novel principles as far as the great part of Scotland was concerned, bad principles, as the experience of Ireland showed—which the House of Lords, and not only the Conservatives in the House of Lords, were not prepared to endorse. Was it Conservative criticism which killed the Bill? It was riddled with arguments by a Liberal Peer and former Liberal Prime Minister—arguments to which the Government speakers were quite unable, and had the good sense not even to attempt, to reply. And that is the instance which is quoted to prove that the House of Lords is a Tory Caucus!
Now, before leaving this question of the House of Lords, let me just say one word about its general attitude. I have not long been a member of that assembly. I do not presume to take much part in its discussions. But I follow them, and I think I follow them with a fairly unprejudiced mind. On many questions I am perhaps not in accord with the views of the majority of the House. But what strikes me about the House of Lords is that it is a singularly independent assembly. It is not at the beck and call of any man. It is a body which does not care at all about party claptrap, but which does care a great deal about a good argument, from whatever quarter it may proceed. Moreover, I am confident that the great body of its members are quite alive to the fact that they cannot afford to cast their votes merely according to their individual opinions and personal prejudices—that they are trustees for the nation, and that while it is their duty to prevent the nation being hustled into revolution, as but for them it would have been hustled into Home Rule in 1893, they have no right to resist changes upon which the nation has clearly and after full deliberation set its mind. And when the Prime Minister says that it is intolerable arrogance on the part of the House of Lords to pretend to know better what the nation wishes than the House of Commons, I can only reply that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In 1893 the House of Commons said that the nation wished Home Rule. The House of Lords had the intolerable arrogance to take a different view. Well, within less than two years the question was submitted to the nation; and who proved to be right?
I regret to have had to dwell at such length upon this particular topic. But it seems to me that we have no choice in the matter. If the Government succeed in their attempt to divert the attention of the nation from matters of the greatest interest at home and abroad in order to involve us all in a constitutional struggle on a false issue, we must be prepared to meet them. But I do not wish to waste the rare opportunity afforded to me to-night of addressing this great and representative Scottish audience by talking exclusively about this regrettable manoeuvre. There is something I am anxious to say to you about the future of the Unionist party. I do not claim to lay down a policy for that or for any party. I am not, by temperament or antecedents, a good party man. But I want to be allowed, as a private citizen, to point out what are the great services which I think the Unionist party can render to the nation at the present very critical juncture in its history. The Unionist party has a splendid record in the past. For twenty years it has saved the United Kingdom from disruption. It has preserved South Africa for the Empire; and, greatly as I feel and know, that the results of the efforts and sacrifices of the nation have been marred and impaired by the disastrous policy of the last two years, South Africa is still one country under the British flag. And all the time, in spite of foreign war and domestic sedition, the Unionist party has pursued a steady policy of practical social reform, and the administrative and legislative record of the last twenty years will compare favourably with that of any period of our history.
But no party can afford to rely upon its past achievements. How is the Unionist party going to confront the great problems of the present day? The greatest of these problems, as I shall never cease to preach to my countrymen, is the maintenance of the great heritage which we owe to the courage, the enterprise, and the self-sacrifice of our forefathers, who built up one of the greatest Empires in history by, on the whole, the most honourable means. The epoch of expansion is pretty nearly past, but there remains before us a great work of development and consolidation. And that is a work which should appeal especially to Scotsmen. The Scottish people have borne a great part, great out of proportion to their numbers, in building up our common British heritage. They are taking a foremost part in it to-day. All over the world, as settlers in Canada, in Australia, or in South Africa, as administrators in India and elsewhere, they are among the sturdiest pillars on which the great Imperial fabric rests. I am not talking in the air. I am speaking from my personal experience, and only saying in public here to-night what I have said in private a hundred times, that as an agent of my country in distant lands I have had endless occasion to appreciate the support given to the British cause by the ability, the courage, the shrewd sense and the broad Imperial instinct of many Scotsmen. And therefore I look with confidence to a Scottish audience to support my appeal for continuous national effort in making the most of the British Empire. I say this is not a matter with regard to which we can afford to rest on our laurels. We must either go forward or we shall go back. And especially ought we to go forward in developing co-operation, on a basis of equality and partnership, with the great self-governing communities of our race in the distant portions of the world, else they will drift away from us. Do not let us think for a moment that we can afford such another fiasco as the late Colonial Conference. Do not let us imagine for a moment that we can go to sleep over the questions then raised, and not one of them settled, for four years, only to find ourselves unprepared when the next Conference meets. A cordial social welcome, many toasts, many dinners, are all very well in their way, but they are not enough. What is wanted is a real understanding of what our fellow countrymen across the seas are driving at, and a real attempt to meet them in their efforts to keep us a united family. All that our present rulers seem able to do is to misunderstand, and therefore unconsciously to misrepresent—I do not question their good intentions, but I think they are struck with mental blindness in this matter—to misrepresent the attitude of the colonists and greatly to exaggerate the difficulties of meeting them half-way. The speeches of Ministers on a question like that of Colonial Preference leave upon me the most deplorable impression. One would have thought that, if they could not get over the objections which they feel to meeting the advances of our kinsmen, they would at least show some sort of regret at their failure. But not a bit of it. Their one idea all along has been to magnify the difficulties in the way in order to make party capital out of the business. They saw their way to a good cry about "taxing the food of the people," the big and the little loaf, and so forth, and they went racing after it, regardless of everything but its electioneering value. From first to last there has been the same desire to make the worst of things, sometimes by very disingenuous means. First of all it was said that there was "no Colonial offer." But when the representatives of the Colonies came here, and all in the plainest terms offered us preference for preference, this device evidently had to be abandoned. So then it was asserted that, in order to give preference to the Colonies, we must tax raw materials. But this move again was promptly checkmated by the clear and repeated declaration of the Colonial representatives that they did not expect us to tax raw materials. And so nothing was left to Ministers, determined as they were to wriggle out of any agreement with the Colonies at all costs, except to fall back on the old, weary parrot-cry—"Will you tax corn?" "Will you tax butter?" and so on through the whole list of articles of common consumption, the taxation of any one of which was thought to be valuable as an electioneering bogey.
For my own part, I am not the least bit frightened by any of these questions. If I am asked whether I would tax this or tax that, it may be proof of great depravity on my part, but I say without hesitation, that, for a sufficient object, I should not have the least objection to putting two shillings a quarter on wheat or twopence a pound on butter. But I must add that the whole argument nauseates me. What sort of opinion must these gentlemen have of their fellow countrymen, if they think that the question of a farthing on the quartern loaf or half a farthing on the pat of butter is going to outweigh in their minds every national consideration? And these are the men who accused Mr. Chamberlain of wishing to unite the Empire by sordid bonds! It is indeed extraordinary and to my mind almost heartrending to see how this question of Tariff Reform continues to be discussed on the lowest grounds, and how its higher and wider aspects seem to be so constantly neglected. Yet we have no excuse for ignoring them. The Colonial advocates of Preference, and especially Mr. Deakin, with whose point of view I thoroughly agree, have repeatedly explained the great political, national, and I might almost say moral aspects of that policy. There is a great deal more in it than a readjustment of duties—twopence off this and a penny on that. I do not say that such details are not important. When the time comes I am prepared to show—and I am an old hand at these things—that the objections which loom so large in many eyes can really be very easily circumvented. But I would not attempt to bother my fellow countrymen with complicated changes in their fiscal arrangements, or even with the discussion of them, if it were not for the bigness of the principle that is involved.
I wish to look at it from two points of view. The principle which lies at the root of Tariff Reform, in its Imperial aspect, is the national principle. The people of these great dominions beyond the seas are no strangers to us. They are our own kith and kin. We do not wish to deal with them, even in merely material matters, on the same basis as with strangers. That is the great difference between us Tariff Reformers and the Cobdenites. The Cobdenite only looks at the commercial side. He is a cosmopolitan. He does not care from whom he buys, or to whom he sells. He does not care about the ulterior effects of his trading, whether it promotes British industry or ruins it; whether it assists the growth of the kindred States, or only enriches foreign countries. To us Tariff Reformers these matters are of moment, and of the most tremendous moment. We do not undervalue our great foreign trade, and I for one am convinced that there is nothing in the principles of Tariff Reform which will injure that trade. Quite the reverse. But we do hold that our first concern is with the industry and productive capacities of our own country, and our next with those of the great kindred countries across the seas. We hold that a wise fiscal policy would help to direct commerce into channels which would not only assist the British worker, but also assist Colonial development, and make for the greater and more rapid growth of those countries, which not only contain our best customers, but our fellow citizens.
That, I say, is one aspect of the matter. But then there is the other side—the question of social reform in this country. Now here again we differ from the Cobdenite. The Cobdenite is an individualist. He believes that private enterprise, working under a system of unfettered competition, with cheapness as its supreme object, is the surest road to universal well-being. The Tariff Reformer also believes in private enterprise, but he does not believe that the mere blind struggle for individual gain is going to produce the most beneficent results. He does not believe in cheapness if it is the result of sweating or of underpaid labour. He keeps before him as the main object of all domestic policy the gradual, steady elevation of the standard of life throughout the community; and he believes that the action of the State deliberately directed to the encouragement of British industry, not merely by tariffs, is part and parcel of any sound national policy and of true Imperialism. And please observe that in a number of cases the Radical party itself has abandoned Cobdenism. Pure individualism went to the wall in the Factory Acts, and it is going to the wall every day in our domestic legislation. It is solely with regard to this matter of imports that the Radical party still cling to the Cobdenite doctrine, and the consequence is that their policy has become a mass of inconsistencies. It is devoid of any logical foundation whatever.
I know that there are many people, sound Unionists at heart, who still have a difficulty about accepting the doctrines of the Tariff Reformers. My belief is that, if they could only look at the matter from the broad national and Imperial point of view, they would come to alter their convictions. I am not advocating Tariff Reform as in itself the greatest of human objects. But it seems to me the key of the position. It seems to me that, without it, we can neither take the first steps towards drawing closer the bonds between the mother country and the great self-governing States of the Empire; nor maintain the prosperity of the British worker in face of unfair foreign competition; nor obtain that large and elastic revenue which is absolutely essential, if we are going to pursue a policy of social reform and mean real business. I cannot but hope that many of those who still shy at Tariff Reform, when they come to look at it from this point of view—to see it as I see it, not as an isolated thing, but as an essential and necessary part of a comprehensive national policy—will rally to our cause. I have travelled along that road myself. I have been a Cobdenite myself—I am not ashamed of it. But I have come to see that the doctrine of free imports—the religion of free imports, I ought to say—as it is practised in this country to-day, is inconsistent with social reform, inconsistent with fair play to British industry, and inconsistent with the development and consolidation of the Empire. And therefore I rejoice that, in the really great speech which he delivered last night, the leader of the Unionist party has once more unhesitatingly affirmed his adhesion to the principles which I have been trying, in my feebler way, to advocate here this evening. My own conviction is that, when these principles are understood in all their bearings, they will command the approval of the mass of the people. And even in Scotland, where I dare say it is a very uphill fight, I look forward with confidence to their ultimate victory. Do not let us be discouraged if the fight is long and the progress slow. The great permanent influences are on our side. On the one hand there is the growth of the Empire, with all the opportunities which it affords; on the other there is the increasing determination of foreign nations to keep their business to themselves. These potent facts, which have already converted so many leading minds, will in due time make themselves felt in ever-widening circles. And they will not fail to produce their effect upon the shrewd practical sense of the Scottish people, especially when combined with an appeal to the patriotic instincts of a race which has done so much to make the Empire what it is, and which has such a supreme interest in its maintenance and consolidation.