"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."