Lord Randolph Churchill

by Winston Churchill

My Dear R. C.,—I am very sorry you do not dine with me this evening, and still more for the cause.

At half-past five this morning I moved that the Committee be nominated, but I was met by cries from the other side of the House that it was opposed, and by murmurs from our own benches, and I felt it was impossible to proceed further at that hour with a jaded and heated house.

I am sure you would have done as I did if you had been in my place.

Yours very sincerely,
W. H. Smith.

But the Committee was appointed without further delay.

Meanwhile Lord Randolph had been industriously preparing his general indictment of War Office and Admiralty maladministration. To the intricate and detailed information which he had acquired at the Treasury, he added a mass of material accumulated with the greatest care and trouble by Mr. Jennings and amplified and checked by various expert authorities, with whom he was in communication. Basing himself on this and on the papers presented to Parliament he formulated his charges at Wolverhampton on June 3. He seems to have believed sincerely that it would be possible for him to effect a large reduction in the cost of government. He recalled to his mind the fact that the Government of 1860 was determined on a retrenchment policy, and the Army and Navy Estimates were in five years reduced from 27½ millions to 22½ millions; and that whereas in 1868 the estimates were 25 millions, by 1871 they had been reduced to 21 millions. Such examples may prove the possibility of retrenchment, but they were the achievements of a giant Minister working year by year from inside the Cabinet, and using the whole leverage of the great department over which he presided; and we have since learned from Mr. Morley’s pages that even in Liberal Cabinets elected on the famous watchwords of ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’ Mr. Gladstone had to fight for his economies at the constant peril of his official life.

It is instructive to study the course of an agitation for naval and military economy directed by anyone outside the circle of the Government of the day and without the aid of the machinery of State. It may begin in all undivided earnestness in a simple demand for a reduction of expenditure. The Government and its official advisers will reply that they, too, are the zealous advocates of such a policy, if only they can be shown how to effect it; and they invite suggestions of a specific character. That is the first stage. Thus challenged, the economist leaves for the moment the enunciation of great principles of finance and national policy and descends to grapple with masses of technical details. He discovers a quantity of muddles and jobs, and arrays imposing instances of waste and inefficiency. His statements are, of course, contradicted, and his charges are wrangled over seriatim. Expert is set against expert, and assertion against assertion. The reformer is accused—not, generally, without some justice—of exaggeration; and he is in part and in detail inevitably betrayed into inaccuracy. But in the issue enough is proved to awaken public anxiety and even indignation. Certain main facts of discreditable and disquieting character are clearly established. Many weaknesses, neglects, incompetencies are revealed. There are guns without ammunition. There are fortresses without provisions. There are regiments without reserves. There are ships imperfectly constructed. There are weapons which are obsolete or bad. But in the process of the controversy the movement has been insensibly and irresistibly deflected from its original object. It began in a cry for economy; it has become a cry for efficiency. That is the second stage. The Government and their official advisers at the proper moment now shift their ground with an adroitness born of past experience. They admit the damaging facts which can no longer be denied. The politicians explain that they arise from the neglect or incapacity of their predecessors. They recognise the public demand for more perfect instruments of war. They declare that they will not flinch from their plain duty (whatever others may have done); they will repair the deficiencies which clearly exist; they will correct the abuses which have been exposed; and in due course they will send in the bill to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. So that the third stage of an unofficial agitation in favour of a reduction of expenditure and a more modest establishment becomes an agitation in favour of an increase of expenditure and a more lavish establishment.

All this happened exactly in the case of Lord Randolph Churchill. In his earlier speeches since his resignation he had confined himself to the need of retrenchment, and this had been the ground on which he had fought in the Cabinet. But at Wolverhampton he sought to show that, in spite of the great and increasing expenditure, the services were in a wholly unsatisfactory and even dangerous condition. And in this he was beyond all question brilliantly successful. In a fierce speech of an hour and forty minutes he unfolded a comprehensive catalogue of follies. His audience, consisting of about 4,000 persons—mainly Conservative working men—at first doubtful and apathetic, were gradually raised, as the newspaper reports testify, to a state of indignation. With a display of feeling unusual even at a partisan meeting, and still more remarkable when the currents of ordinary partisanship were running against the speaker, they interrupted him repeatedly with cries of anger, and he ended amid a perfect tumult of assent.

It is not necessary to this account to examine the details of his charges. Each generation has its own jobs and scandals to confront. The administrative follies of 1887 have passed away. Some survived, to be dwarfed by more astonishing successors; others were corrected, but not extirpated. All have produced a prosperous progeny, nourished in richer pastures, and attaining proportions of which their ancestors could hardly have dreamed. The main outlines of the indictment must, however, be placed on record. The condition of the British Army and Navy in the year 1887 was, in sober truth, a serious public danger. Mr. Gladstone’s Government of 1880 had had, during their tenure of office, to deal with all kinds of military and Colonial enterprises for the effective execution of which a Liberal Administration is not naturally fitted. They detested their work heartily; they executed it very badly. In truth the Cabinet, distracted by the violence of Egyptian and Irish affairs and the gravity of the Eastern situation, torn by the increasing demands of Radicalism, and harassed by a relentless Opposition, was incapable of giving to naval and military matters adequate consideration. There had followed upon all this the two years of political revolution with which this story has been largely concerned. It was natural, it was inevitable, that in the interval which had elapsed since the great Army Reform Parliament of 1868 much waste and inefficiency should have crept into the military system; and in the same period, from considerations altogether outside the course of British politics, an enormous extension and complexity had affected the responsibilities and functions of the Navy.