Sketches in the House: The Story of a Memorable Session (1893)

by T. P. O'Connor

The out-manoeuvred Tories.

I think I have now said enough to explain what I am going to relate. Mr. Gladstone explained his proposal; which briefly was, that in order to get on with Home Rule it was necessary to take the time of private members. As will have been seen, the meaning of this would have been to have swept away at once all the private motions in which members were interested. When the motion came to be discussed, there was a very curious phenomenon. Everybody had been reading in the morning papers the chorus of disapproval in which the Tory press had been denouncing the leadership of the Tory party, liberals had been repeating to each other with delight the verdict of the chief Tory organ—the Standard newspaper—that the Tory party had been out-manoeuvred and beaten at every point in the struggle, and that the portentous promises of the recess had been utterly baffled by the superior judgment, the better concerted tactics, and, above all, by the unexpected solidity and cohesion of the Liberal party.

Organized for obstruction.

That all this had produced its effect on the Tory party as well was soon evident. An old campaigner in the House of Commons can soon tell when a party has been organized for the purpose of Obstruction. There is a feverishness; there are ample notes; there is a rising of many members at the same time when the moment comes to catch the Speaker's eye. Other indications presented themselves. Mr. Seton-Karr is, personally, one of the kindliest of men—cheery, good-natured, full of the easy give-and-take of political struggle; but even he himself would not claim to be a Parliamentary orator. But on February 27th, he, as much as everybody else, must have been surprised to find that his utterances, which, in truth, were stumbling enough, should at every point be punctuated by a deep bellow of cheers such as might have delighted the most trained and the most accomplished orators in the House. The House itself was at first taken aback by this outburst of deep-throated and raucous cheers, and after it had sufficiently recovered from its surprise discovered that it all came from one bench—the front bench below the gangway. On this bench there were gathered together a number of the younger members of the Tory party.

The claque in Parliament.

At once it was seen what had taken place; the Tories, stung to action by the taunts of their own press, had concerted a new system of tactics. And one portion of these tactics was to introduce into the House of Commons a phenomenon new to even its secular and varied experience—namely, an organized claque. It was really just as if one were in a French theatre. Uniformly, regularly, with a certain mechanical and hollow effect underneath its bellowings, the group below the gangway uttered its war notes. Beyond all question, recognizable by the unmistakable family features, it was there—the organized theatrical claque on the floor of the British House of Commons. There were other indications of the transformation on which the Tories were determined. When Mr. Seton-Karr sate down after a palpably obstructive speech, Mr. Bartley got up, and several other Tories at the same time. Mr. Bartley is not an attractive personality. He has a very strong rather than pleasant or intellectual face. There is plenty of bulldog tenacity in it—plenty of animal courage, plenty of self-confidence; but it has none of the rays of a strong intelligence, and not many glimpses of kindliness or sweetness of nature. It is in the work of obstruction that one sees temperament rather than intellect in the House of Commons. Obstruction does not call for very high intellectual powers, though, undoubtedly, obstruction can at the same time display the highest powers.

Artists in obstruction.

For instance, Mr. Sexton made his first reputation in the House of Commons by a speech three hours in duration, which was regarded by the majority as an intentional waste of time and an obstruction of a hateful Bill, but which everybody had to hear from the sheer force of its splendid reasoning, orderly arrangement of material, and now and then bursts of the best form of Parliamentary eloquence. But the obstructionist wants, as a rule, strength of character rather than of oratory—as witness the extraordinary work in obstruction done by the late Mr. Biggar, who, by nature, was one of the most inarticulate of men. It was because Biggar had nerves of steel—a courage that did not know the meaning of fear, and that remained calm in the midst of a cyclone of repugnance, hatred, and menace. Mr. Bartley, then, has the character for the obstructive, and he rose blithely on the waves of the Parliamentary tempest. But he had to face a continuous roar of interruption and hostility from the Irish benches—those converted sinners who have abjured sack, and have become the most orderly and loyal, and steadfast of Ministerialist bulwarks. And now and then when the roar of interruption became loud and almost deafening, there arose from the Tory bench below the gangway that strange new claque which on that Monday night I heard for the first time in the House of Commons.

Mr. James Lowther.

One other figure rose out of the sea of upturned and vehement faces at this moment of stress and storm. When the Irish Members were shouting disapproval there suddenly gleamed upon them a face from the front Opposition bench. It was a startling—I might almost say a menacing exhibition. It was the face of Mr. James Lowther. I find that few people have as keen an appreciation of this remarkable man as I have. In his own party he passes more or less for a mere comedian—indeed, I might say, low comedian, in the professional and not in the offensive sense. His tenure of the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland is looked back upon, in an age that has known Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. John Morley, as a sublime and daring joke by Disraeli which belongs to, and could only happen in an epoch when sober England was ready to allow her Oriental juggler and master to play any kind of Midsummer's Night's Dream pranks even with the sternest realities of human life. Yet sometimes the thought occurs to me that if he were a little more articulate, or, perchance, if the time came when a democracy had to be met, not with bursts of Parliamentary eloquence, but with shot and shell, and the determination to kill or be killed, the leadership of the party of the aristocracy would fall from the effeminate hands of the supersubtle and cultivated Mr. Balfour into the firm and tight grip of the rugged, uncultured country gentleman who sits remote and neglected close to him. There are the tightness and firmness of a death-trap in the large, strong mouth, a dangerous gleam in the steady eyes, infinite powers of firmness, inflexibility, and of even cruelty in the whole expression, not in the least softened, but rather heightened and exalted by the pretty constant smile—the smile that indicates the absence alike of the heat of passion or the touch of pity, and that speaks aloud of the unquestioning and dogged resolve of the aristocrat to fight for privilege to the death.