He pointed with his finger to a group of three men high up on a back bench—Dillworth, Champion and Tomlin. I had heard the first two in the debate on the Address, and the last I was to hear many times before I left the House. They represented the Socialist State, and for passion, logic and incorruptibility ran the Nationalists close. As the Session aged, nine-tenths of the new members were unconsciously affected by the moral atmosphere of the House; compromise dulled the fine edge of our convictions, our constant close proximity to the Opposition mellowed our spirit; and a recognition of personal traits, the utterance of feeble, obscure, friendly jokes induced the belief that our worst enemy was fool rather than knave. The intransigeant Socialists kept their souls untainted by compromise; for them there was no dealing with Liberal or Conservative, and, when Tomlin spoke on Labour questions, you could imagine a Socialist foot-rule in his hand by which every reform was to be measured.
I disapprove the Socialist State he expounded, I dispute his premises and charge him with possessing the same excessive logic which led primitive ascetics to inch-by-inch suicide or drove doctrinaires of the French Revolution to destroy church spires in the interests of Republican equality. But I admire his passion of soul and intensity of vision; I recognize that his group of idealogues at least appreciated that the perfect State presupposes an all-embracing social philosophy.
There are few more moving sights than a preacher without a congregation, or with one that is incapable of understanding. St. Francis of Assisi won warmer response from his birds than Campion or Dillworth from the 1906 Parliament. Their audience numbered too many barristers, and the Bar has never been famous for its imagination or sympathy. Socialism, as offered by Campion and accepted by, say, Robert Plumer, K.C., suggested the form that the Sermon on the Mount might assume in the hands of an efficient parliamentary draughtsman. The Socialists were not slow to appraise their critics, and I sometimes think a great part of the later industrial troubles rose from a belief that laws and agreements were framed by skilled hair-splitters for the confusion of trusting manual workers.
The belief was fostered by the Press and a generous use of the "lawyer-politician" catchword. I have never been associated with the law, but I had opportunities of studying my legal colleagues in bulk, and a sillier phrase never obsessed the mind of a considerable people. Granted that the Bar was of arid, unimaginative temper, granted that it invaded the House for what the House could give it, may not the same charge be brought against seven-tenths of the non-legal members? And pressmen and barristers alone seem to enjoy the faculty of assimilating huge masses of strange matter in short time.
The Bar in Parliament appeared at its worst, not in the Chamber but in the Smoking-Room. I remember my uncle taking me aside after my election and counselling me as though I were a younger brother going to school for the first time. I was to sit tight until I had learned the procedure of the House, and after that—well, any man of average intelligence who wore out his patience and his trousers for ten years would be in the Ministry at the end. I was to put parliament before everything else and shed any idea that I could write novels between divisions, or contribute to the Press, or live with one foot in the House and the other in Mayfair. I was to cultivate the personal touch and read Ronsard for the pleasure of quoting him to Mr. Windham. But first and last and all the while I was to avoid the Smoking-Room.
"It's the grave of young reputations, George," he told me one day when we were seated there in a corner consecrated immemorially to his private use. "You sit and talk about what you're going to do, you discuss your neighbors,—this comes well from me, I know, but I'm an old sinner with a wasted life, and you're still a boy,—you shuffle jobs and appointments everlastingly, and in the meantime Ministers never see you, you learn nothing and you're always a day late for your opportunities. Remember that there's never any warning in the House, George. You'll get a dozen chances of winning your spurs, but only by sitting, sitting, sitting in your place when other people have gone away to dinner. Leave the Smoking-Room alone, my boy."
So for one session I followed his advice. After two hours in the "grave of young reputations" I returned to my corner seat, leaving a knot of barristers to cast lots for the vacant Harleyridge recordership, leaving my uncle, too, to watch the great movement of men. My sense of duty was so shortlived that I may be pardoned for dwelling on it and saying that the Smoking-Room is the most interesting place in the House. A year or two later, when I appreciated the wonderful mandarinesque inaccessibility of the Cabinet and saw how little the private member was wanted anywhere but in the division lobbies, I hurried away to places where at the least a man could smoke and talk.
The change was not ennobling but it gave infinitely more varied food for thought. I watched the social levelling-up of Radicalism and saw stern, unbending Nonconformists honoured and decorated for all the world like Tory supporters of the Establishment. At one time Baxter-Whittingham, looking strangely like a famished undertaker in his loose, half-clerical clothes, had criticized the Government as persistently as Campion or Dillworth; his mind stored with the memory of working-class conditions in Shadwell, his voice throbbing with indignation and pity, he had arraigned a Ministry that wasted days on the Address and hours on the obsolete circumlocutions of "Honourable and gallant members," "Mr. Speaker, I venture to say—and I do not think the most captious critic will contradict me ...," while men starved and women trod the path of shame, while little children went barefoot and verminous.
The silent fortitude of the Treasury Bench under his attacks was a thing to mark and remember. "It amuses him and doesn't hurt us," said my friend Jellaby, the Whip. "So long as he votes...." And Baxter-Whittingham never divided the House against the Government. Once when the Feeding of School Children Bill was in Committee he became dangerous: the Treasury Bench was deserted, and he lavished fine irony on the Ministerial passion for reform. Free-lances and others who had entrusted their social consciences to Whittingham, or were nettled by the intolerable aloofness of Ministers, followed in the same strain, and an excited Whip drove me out of the tea-room and bade me hold myself in readiness for trouble.
The following day the smoking-room presented a strange appearance. Seven members of the Cabinet and four lesser Ministers mingled with the common herd—like naughty schoolboys propitiating a ruffled master. They cracked jokes and slapped us on the back, bade us take pot-luck with them, and asked how things were looking in our constituencies. I lunched with a Secretary of State that day and, to redress the balance, kept my promise to dine with Sir Gerald Matley, the Wesleyan potter and Liberal knight. We were given a wonderful dinner, starting with caviar and ending with cigars like office-rulers, which we were urged to pocket, six at a time, to smoke on the way home. Flushed and rebellious, Philip drunk swore to move the adjournment unless he got a promise of warmer support for the School Children Bill. Philip sober was a shade less valiant. Matley and I, alone of that heroic cave, kept to our undertaking, and our fellow-braves avoided the House for a couple of days. The Treasury Bench smiled a little contemptuously as we proceeded to the Orders of the Day, but the lesson was not entirely thrown away. When the Minimum Wage Appeal Board was set up, Baxter-Whittingham (and who more fit?) was appointed Controller at a salary of £1250 a year, and Shadwell and the House of Commons knew him no more.