As we slid noiselessly into the least passionate general election of my experience, I wondered whether we were going on from anything so good even as 1914. If the German peril was at an end, no man could say what new trouble might come out of the east, when demoralized Russia and Austria joined hands with resentful Turkey and Prussia. The mark had collapsed; and, unless it could be rehabilitated, the trade of central Europe must come to a standstill.
After that, it was a toss-up whether famine or revolution came first. Against this tidal wave of hunger, disease and the reckless savagery of hopeless millions, the only powers with strength and means to build a rampart were France, America and Great Britain.
If Lucien de Grammont and Clifford van Oss fairly represented the first two, the simple faith of the French—embodied in M. Clemenceau—was being betrayed by every one else at the very moment when M. Clemenceau was betraying the simple faith of President Wilson. Recalling that the world was to have been made safe for democracy, I wondered if another war must be fought before democracy was made safe for the world. According to one or other of us, it was the greed and bad faith of Great Britain, America and France which was wholly and solely responsible for our present perils.
In these days of misgiving the most persistent optimist of my acquaintance was my father-in-law. To him—in common with most of my conservative friends—public life had been a bad dream from the moment when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his sansculottes usurped power. Crawleigh was genuinely convinced that all electors, at all times and in all places, were conservative born and bred; and, to him, a liberal victory could only come by low cunning. Now that the spell had been broken, he looked forward to “going on from 1906”; and, in listening to him, I understood, as Saltash had never made me understand, the all-conservative movement in the late coalition, the Carlton Club meeting and the loathing of the party for those who still tried to keep it in bondage to its old associates. So a Bourbon might have felt towards a legitimist who took office under Napoleon.
Sir Roger Dainton, when I dined with him on the night after the polling, was even more outspoken. Some one had taught him the word “impeachment”; and he was for impeaching the fallen members of the old cabinet as light-heartedly as his wife, in other days, had consigned “agitators” to the nearest firing-party.
“You think there are further depths they can still reach?,” I asked. The brush of a professional moralist would be needed to paint the difference between this election and the last, between the power of a prime minister in being and that of the member for Carnarvon Boroughs. “Come and see the results.”
By its rules the Eclectic Club is constituted a “place of social intercourse for officers and gentlemen, irrespective of politics”. Any demonstration, other than occasional groans when a labour victory was announced, would have been ill-received; but I was struck chiefly by the absence of all desire to demonstrate except when objects of personal venom appeared at the bottom of the poll. Dainton thumped my back with furtive violence when two rich and rather questionable private secretaries, from his own party, were at last “put out of harm’s way”, as he expressed it; and Jellaby became almost hysterical as one coalition-liberal after another was edged into the cold; but it was left to my father-in-law to express the rapture of his associates in a series of satisfied grunts. Without looking at the board, I could recognize a conservative gain by Crawleigh’s long “A-a-ah!”
“The entry of the first French troops into their recovered provinces,” I murmured to Jellaby.
“And yet . . . they don’t seem as much pleased about it as I should have expected.”
“Perhaps these fellows feel that it’s the same board, the same problem, and that it becomes no easier by a shuffle of the pieces. Perhaps they’re wondering what more they can do than the coalition to prevent a world-revolution or a new world-war.”