The Commission appointed on June 17, 1888, did not report till March, 1890. Lord Randolph’s separate memorandum, which will be found in the Appendix, is well known. Its sweeping proposals were not adopted by the majority of the Commissioners; but it has been so often quoted, and bears so closely upon modern controversies, that the reader who is interested in these subjects should not neglect to study it. The indirect results of his agitation were, perhaps, more fruitful. Lord George Hamilton, with whom he so often engaged in sharp argument when Navy Estimates recurred, bears a generous tribute to the unseen influence which severe public criticism exerts upon the workings of a great department. It would seem that Lord Randolph Churchill’s belief that considerable economies were possible on the establishments of 1886 was not without foundation.
Lord George Hamilton writes, October 4, 1904:—
During my tenure of office at the Admiralty great changes were made, and in the foremost rank of these reforms was the reorganisation and renovation of the Royal dockyards. These establishments had been allowed to grow and develop without a sufficient regard to the revolution in shipbuilding which the substitution of iron and steel for wood had caused. Laxity in supervision, connivance at practices neither economical nor efficient, dawdling over work, obsolete machinery and ill-adjusted establishments, associated with Estimates framed for political exigence rather than naval needs, all combined to bring these great national building yards into disrepute. The personnel was first-rate both in ability and integrity and the material used as good as money could obtain. All that was required was a thorough readjustment of the establishments to the work they were called upon to do, by the reduction of the redundant and superfluous workmen, by the dismissal of the incompetent, and an increase to the numbers working in steel and iron. Changes such as these, if associated with the introduction of the methods and checks in force in the best private yards, were quite sufficient to put our dockyards in the first rank of building establishments. But whoever undertook the task would be subject to much obloquy, both local and Parliamentary. The stern suppression of long-standing malpractices, the dismissal of a large number of unnecessary and indifferent workmen, if enforced on a large scale, required a strong current of public opinion behind it for its consummation. This assistance I obtained from Lord Randolph Churchill’s crusade on economy. He and I differed on many questions of naval administration, but we were at one as to the necessity of dockyard reform. Many economists who, though agreeing in the abstract with Lord Randolph’s views, hesitated to cut down the effective fighting forces of the Army and Navy, were delighted to co-operate with him in so non-contentious an improvement. The Labour party was not then as well organised or represented in Parliament as they have since become, and their opposition to dockyard dismissals was less strenuous than it would be now.
I was thus enabled, after two years of continuous labour and trouble, to organise the dockyards from top to bottom, to put down establishments that were not required, to dismiss the loiterers, and to establish, modelled on the practice of the best private yards, a completely new system of supervision, check, and control. The effect was electrical. The dockyards at once became the cheapest and most economical builders of warships in the world. The largest ironclad ever designed, up to 1889, was built, completed and commissioned ready for sea in two years and eight months from the date of the laying down of its keel. No large ironclad had been previously completed within five years. Up to 1886 the average cost of the big ships building in these yards was 40 per cent. above their original estimate; since then the estimates have rarely been exceeded. In the first year of the new system there was an instantaneous saving of 400,000l. The continuous and satisfactory progress of our vast and annually increasing building programme is mainly due to those changes, and Lord Randolph could, I think, fairly claim that, though his name was not publicly associated with the great national gain thus achieved, it was the public opinion which he aroused, which largely contributed to the consummation of dockyard reform.
Lord Randolph Churchill addressed five meetings in the autumn and winter of 1887—two at Whitby and Stockport respectively for his two friends, Mr. Beckett and Mr. Jennings; and three in the North. The Whitby meeting in September afforded an opportunity for a display of the hostility with which he was regarded by the dominant section of the Conservative party, for several prominent local worthies publicly refused to attend—a proceeding which even the Times was compelled to censure. The 7,000 persons who gathered upon the sands and around the slopes of a kind of natural amphitheatre under the west cliff gave him a very different welcome, and listened with delighted attention during that beautiful afternoon to a spirited and ingenious defence of the miserable session through which the Government had shuffled. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, as in the earlier meetings of the year, and later in the North, his popularity with the Conservative masses was still undimmed. He was greeted everywhere by immense crowds. The largest halls were much too small. Paddington was loyal and contented. His Birmingham supporters asked no better than to fight for him at once. At Nottingham, long before his arrival, the streets were thronged; and all the way from the station to the Albert Hall he passed through continuous lines of cheering people.[64] Similar scenes took place at Wolverhampton, and the Conservative Association of that borough passed a formal resolution supporting his policy of economy. In the North he made a regular progress. He visited three important centres in a single week and made a ‘trilogy of speeches’—no light task for a speaker whose every word is reported and examined. He spoke on the afternoon of October 20 at Sunderland, at great length, in reply to a previous speech of Mr. Gladstone, covering the whole field of domestic policy and defining the immediate limits of the Tory Democratic programme. These proved sufficiently comprehensive to include Free Education, Local Option in the sale of drink, a compulsory Employer’s Liability Act, the abolition of the power of entailing land upon unborn lives, ‘One man, one vote,’ and Parliamentary registration at the cost of local bodies. At Newcastle, two days later, he spoke in defence of the Union, justified the Government policy in Ireland, and vehemently attacked Mr. Gladstone for the countenance which he showed towards lawlessness and disorder.
On the Monday he spoke at Stockton, and here he turned aside to deal with another subject which had been thrust much upon him of late. Mr. Jennings, like Lord Dunraven, was, as the reader is aware, a Fair Trader, and throughout the year—from the very beginning of their association—he had laboured tactfully, but persistently, to win Lord Randolph to his views. He knew that although the cry of ‘Less waste and no jobbery’ might appeal to many, ‘Economy’ was not in itself a popular cause to submit to a Democratic electorate, and was, moreover, foreign to the instincts and traditions of Toryism. ‘Fair Trade,’ on the contrary, touched a very tender spot in a Conservative breast; and, quite apart from this consideration, Mr. Jennings was an enthusiast. He had examined the question both from an American and a British point of view. He possessed a large and well-stored arsenal of fact and argument. On such subjects as ‘One-sided Free Trade,’ ‘Our Ruined Industries,’ ‘The Dumping of Sweated Goods,’ ‘The Commercial Union of the Empire’ or ‘Our Dwindling Exports’ he could write, as his frequent letters show, with force and feeling. Scarcely since St. Anthony had there been such a temptation on the one hand or such austerity on the other.
‘The main reason,’ Lord Randolph had said at Sunderland, ‘why I do not join myself with the Protectionists is that I believe that low prices in the necessaries of life and political stability in a democratic Constitution are practically inseparable, and that high prices in the necessaries of life and political instability in a democratic Constitution are also practically inseparable.’ And this having drawn upon him the wrath of Mr. Chaplin, he proceeded at Stockport to make his case good. He used no economic arguments. He pointed to the supremacy of the Conservative party as a proof of political stability under low food-prices. He pointed to the conversion of Sir Robert Peel as a proof of political instability, under high food-prices. To make wheat-farming profitable a duty was required which would raise the price of corn from 28s. a quarter to something between 40s. and 45s. a quarter. Would anyone propose a sufficient tax on imported corn to make it worth while for the rural voter to pay the higher prices which Fair Trade would secure for the manufactures of the urban voter? How did the Fair Traders propose to deal with India? How did they propose to deal with Ireland? Could they prove that France, Austria and Germany were more prosperous than Great Britain? ‘It is no use saying to me, "Go to America or New South Wales." I will not go to America, and I will not go to New South Wales. There is not the smallest analogy between those countries and England. America is a self-contained country and almost everything she requires for her people she can produce in abundance. We cannot. We have more people than we can feed; and not only for food, but for our manufactures, we depend upon raw material imported from abroad. Therefore I decline to go to America or New South Wales; but I would go to European countries—to France, Austria and Germany—and I want to know whether the Fair Traders can prove that the people of those countries are more prosperous than ours.’
This Stockton speech was naturally a great disappointment to Jennings. ‘I cannot deny,’ he wrote, ‘that you gave many of your followers a bitter pill to swallow. I think I could give you satisfactory grounds for admitting that your objections to "Fair Trade" will not stand much investigation; but, of course, the real difficulty is that in many of our constituencies the question is popular. We have been partly elected on the strength of it; and when you attack it, you fire a broadside into your own supporters and give the Radicals in our boroughs a stick to beat us with. It is hard for us to fight against your authority, especially when we have been drilling into the minds of the people that yours are the views they should adopt. If you ever had half an hour to spare, I wish you would allow me to put the facts before you. You would soon see, for example,....’ And then follow pages of tersely stated arguments of a kind with which most people are now only too familiar.
They produced no effect upon Lord Randolph. ‘The policy which you advocate,’ he replied (October 30), ‘of duties on foreign imports for revenue purposes, much attracted me at one time; but I came to the conclusion that, although such a policy would gain the adhesion of the manufacturing towns, it is open to such fearful attack from the Radicals among the country population that we should lose more than we should gain. I cannot see how you can persuade yourself that the country population would accept a method of raising revenue which would directly benefit the manufacturing population at their expense. The election of ‘85 made a great impression upon me. Then the defection of the rural vote completely neutralised our great successes in the English boroughs.’ And again on November 3, after the discussions at the conference of Conservative Associations: ‘Do you see how the Fair Traders have been wrangling and disputing with each other—everyone going in a different direction—confirming all that I said at Stockton about their not knowing their own minds?’ Late in November came an invitation from the ‘British Union,’ a Protectionist Association having its headquarters in Manchester—of all places—to which Lord Randolph replied as follows:—