The Unionist party divided, prominent Ministers left the Cabinet and a battle royal raged between "Free Fooders" and "Whole Hoggers," while the Tariff Commission scoured the business centres of the kingdom in search of evidence to support the Chamberlain indictment. To the layman it seemed as if Mr. Balfour's continued tenure of office could be counted by weeks, and as "General Election" came back to men's lips, political interest revived throughout the country and there arose a lust for Social Reform only comparable to the famous summer weeks of the French National Convention.
My interest in politics, long confined to sterile criticism of the Education and Licensing Acts enlivened by fierce denunciation of the Government's indentured labour in South Africa, became of a sudden constructive, vital and effective. Returning to town in October I took rooms in King Street, St. James's and resuscitated the Thursday Club. The Government had a wonderful knack of shamming death and never dying, and in 1903 we seemed within a month or two of dissolution. A comprehensive programme was needed, and speaking for Youth, Liberalism, Oxford, we rushed into print with our "Thursday Essays."
I can see now that there was little originality in the book. Half-unconsciously we hearkened to the voices that were murmuring round about us and, with the impetuosity of youth, always went one better than anyone else, including, at a late date, the official programme-mongers headed by the new Liberal Prime Minister at the Albert Hall. Campbell-Bannerman might postpone the settlement of Ireland, but we were not so faint-hearted; Mr. Birrell might plead for Simple Bible Teaching as a solution of the religious education difficulty, we boldly declared for secularism, and so throughout our six or eight chapters.
Glancing at the old "Essays" with their Oxford omniscience and glittering epigram, their logic—and faith in logic, their assurance and perfervidity, I feel very old or very young, I am not sure which. We Liberal Leaguers of 1903 were to have so strange a history in the next ten years. The old Radicalism of Boer War days, the Peace-Retrenchment-and-Reform Radicalism was, in 1903, hardly respectable: we thought as "imperially" as the truest Chamberlain stalwart. Dilke, with his "Greater Britain," was our pattern Radical statesman, and the Federation of the Empire took place of honour in our manifesto. By a curious irony the 1906 election was too successful: there were too many Noncomformists seeking to recast Education and Suppress Beer, too many Labour men with visions of expensive Social Reform. The Liberal League—most gentlemanly of parties—was captured; its leaders retained their positions of command by undertaking to push other people's Bills. Not till the Great War broke out did they come to their own again.
Dilke was our model abroad, but, when the vociferous, Radico-Labour-Nonconformist majority demanded Social Reform and a new heaven and earth, we were constrained to seek fresh guidance. We found it in the Webb handbooks for bureaucrats. With their stupendous mastery of detail, their analysis and classification, their prescriptions for every variety of social ill, they were an incomparable vade-mecum for legislators in a hurry. They appealed to the lazy man and the Oxford mind. I remember my relief some years later in reading "The Break-up of the Poor Law," for unemployment had never seemed easy till I found the industrial population divided by percentages, ticketed and mobilized, ultimately pressed into penal colonies in the case of recalcitrancy. I had a perfect scheme cooked, eaten and digested for the Labour man who demanded unemployment legislation and the silly-season correspondent who inquired in general terms whether the unemployed were not really the unemployable. The Webb influence was paramount in the meetings of the Thursday Club, and in our essays on Social Reform I trace a Webb-derived mechanical conception of the State, a lust for sweeping legislation, a disregard for mere flesh and blood and a growing reliance on governmental control and coercion.
Our book was produced in 1904, but I did not wait to assist at its publication. In the autumn of 1903 my eyesight—never strong—underwent one of its eclipses, and my doctor ordered me a sea-voyage. For a year I wandered round the world, still full enough of the Dilke ideal to make special study of British colonies and possessions abroad. I went alone, because Loring, one of the few acceptable companions with money and leisure to spare, answered my invitation in Dr. Johnson's words: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail: for being in a ship is being in jail with a chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." The Daintons, however, who were wintering in Cairo, travelled with me as far as Alexandria.
A couple of days before we started I went down to Crowley Court to join them. Tom, who had lately bought himself a small car, motored his brother and O'Rane over from Oxford, to say good-bye. They returned the same evening, but in their brief visit there was time for an embarrassing upheaval. I noticed that Lady Dainton was rather flushed and ill at ease during luncheon, and in the course of the afternoon O'Rane gave me the reason.
"She's a damned, interfering meddler!" he burst out, with no other introduction to the subject. "Lady Dainton, of course, who else? She had the cheek to tell me she didn't like my writing to Sonia so much."
"What's her objection?" I asked.