CHAPTER IV SONIA DAINTON
"Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liars and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles, devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet and watchful persons, usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every one of this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her, but teaching urgently and with every grade of intensity, views and habits for which they stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeit much may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with a new little variation, a fresh slight novelty of arrangement, the old issues rise again. Our ideas, even more than our blood, flow from multitudinous sources."
H. G. Wells, "An Englishman Looks at the World."
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.