Jellaby forged ahead with growing enthusiasm. The local associations were solidly in support of the Asquith wing, solidly opposed to the Lloyd-George renegades. Much capital could be made out of the Safeguarding of Industries Bill (“which is pure protection; you’d have thought the tories had had enough protection in 1906”); more from the Black-and-Tan reprisals in Ireland; most of all from the unpopularity of the coalition.
“But have you considered why it’s unpopular?,” I broke in at last. “Not because its policy is faintly protectionist—the electors to-day don’t care tuppence about free trade—; not because it tried to put down murder with more murder. What people care about is taxation and the cost of living and unemployment and, above all else, my dear Frank, security. We’re in sight of another and a bloodier war.”
“With a man like Lloyd-George . . .,” he began with a kindling eye.
I did not wait, however, for the end of the tirade. No one beyond Jellaby’s immediate circle of colleagues cared about the internecine feuds of exasperated factionaries; and I look back on this night as the time when so temperamental, congenital and impenitent a liberal as myself had to realize that there was at present no hope for liberalism in the liberal party. So far as the roar of his indignant rhetoric allowed me, I tried to formulate the demands of all who shared my own feeling of insecurity. The country was demoralized by the war and by the paralysis of government that followed it; instinctively the country wanted to be put into training, to have its muscles hardened and—still more—its nerves steadied. Though the heat of civil war had died down in Ireland, it had been replaced by the fitful blaze of individual assassination; the chief of the imperial general staff was done to death this summer on the steps of his house in London; the commander-in-chief of the Free State army was ambushed in Ireland. It was idle to bandy figures of murders and reprisals, when the country demanded a cure for its own demoralization.
“People feel it’s time to pull up, take stock, overhaul,” I said. “It’s the spirit of 1914, when the war did for us what we could not do for ourselves.”
“And that security is just what the liberal party offers,” said Jellaby. “Standing midway between a tory reaction and socialism . . .”
“If you’re going to be the safe, middle party,” I interrupted, “go all-out for that. In 1918 you had no policy; you have no living policy now. The only thing you’ve learnt since 1914 is that you have a score to settle with the coalition-liberals. While you’re settling that, the country will look for a government that will tackle unemployment before the unemployed get out of hand, a government that doesn’t bring us as near war as we are to-night.”
We argued inconclusively until the theatres emptied. As there was still no sign of Saltash, I judged that—in his favourite phrase—he must be troubling the waters to some purpose; and I was preparing to leave when Sam Dainton hurried up to demand why I had not yet patronized his cocktail-bar. He was followed—at an interval of time and space calculated to disarm the king’s proctor—by Ivy Gaymer, who told me that she expected her decree to be made absolute the following week.
“These six months have been hell,” she cried viciously, as she danced away with Sam.
Marking her difference of outlook and appearance since she first sought from me an introduction to journalism, I felt that we were threatened by a worse spirit than that of 1914 and that we stood in need of harder moral training. Ivy’s reputation was hanging by a thread; her fingers and Sam Dainton’s were itching equally to snap it.