Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  Balfour’s life was made up of opposites, each essential, each providing balance for the other: the serenity of philosophy and the thrust and parry of parliamentary debate, the clamor of Society and the quiet of solitude. “When I’m at work in politics,59 I long to be in literature and vice versa,” he told John Morley. He made other men uneasy. His ability to see both sides of issues troubled political colleagues and opponents, who sometimes charged him with cynicism. “Quite a good fellow,”60 Balfour would say of an adversary. “Has a curious view. Not uninteresting.” Once, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was accused of planning to jail six Irish nationalist M.P.’s in the hope that they would die in prison. Balfour dismissed the charge as “ridiculous” and “grotesque”61 and continued, “I should like to say that I should profoundly regret the permanent absence of any of the distinguished men who lead the Parnellite Party.... If you sit opposite a man every day, and you are engaged in fighting him, you cannot help getting a liking for him whether he deserves it or not.” Temperamentally and philosophically, Balfour refused to see life in terms of absolutes. This was important, that was more important, neither was really important, he seemed to say. Margot Asquith decided that the secret of her friend’s imperturbability was that he did not “really believe62 that the happiness of mankind depends on events going this way or that.”

  Behind this dispassionate approach to life lay a sober pessimism about human destiny. On the surface, Balfour was religious, a conventional Anglican who attended Sunday morning services and read Sunday evening prayers to his guests and servants sitting in chairs around his dining room. On another level, Balfour had learned from science that, set against the immensities of time, man was a puny, transitory creature. His view of man’s ultimate fate was bleak: “Imperishable monuments63 and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.”

  Arthur Balfour’s retreat as Chief Secretary for Ireland, as leader of the House, and later as Prime Minister, was his childhood home at Whittingehame. The mistress of the house was his unmarried sister, Alice. Other residents, in the summer, included two brothers and their families with a total of three nephews and eight nieces. Balfour presided serenely over this establishment, playing hero to an eager bodyguard of giggling nieces. Each wanted to sit next to him at seashore picnics; all banded together to invade his sitting room, where “having cooked for him a sparrow64 rolled in clay according to a Red Indian recipe, [they] had presented it to him on a platter... in hopes of seeing him eat it.”

  Amid this activity, he preserved an attitude of calm. He breakfasted in bed and, until lunchtime, remained in his rooms dictating letters. Because he never read the newspapers, the family competed over lunch to tell him the news. In the afternoon, he sometimes played tennis on his own grass court (he played into his seventies) or rode his bicycle (the learning process took its toll, forcing the Leader to appear in the House at one point with an arm in a sling and a foot in a slipper). His obsession was golf. Every year, Balfour dedicated an entire month (usually August) to the then new sport. Tory aristocrats and country gentlemen snorted at their leader’s middle-class recreations; men who killed birds and rode to the hounds had trouble understanding a man who wobbled about on bicycles and played “this damned Scottish croquet.”65 But they recalled Balfour was a Cecil, and Lord Salisbury, the greatest Cecil of the day, shunned all sports and did not even go out of doors except to examine flora. Music surrounded Balfour. Two grand pianos filled his London parlor in Carlton Gardens, where the Handel Society often rehearsed. Even in Scotland, music followed dinner as a guest or an invited performer played Handel, Bach, or Beethoven on the concertina. Books were more important even than music. His library and sitting room overflowed from floor to ceiling with books. Between tea and dinner, and again for an hour or two before retiring, Balfour read. A new book on science might be propped on his bedroom mantelpiece so that he could read while dressing; his sister-in-law suspected him of “making a raft with his sponge”66 so that he could float a French novel on it when he bathed.

  fn1 Who was to be Foreign Secretary in the Balfour Cabinet.

  Chapter 19

  Joseph Chamberlain and Imperial Preference

  Joseph Chamberlain believed in imperialism. His design for the British Empire was of a worldwide family of nations, diverse, secure, prosperous—and closely tied to the United Kingdom. To promote this design he had taken the Colonial Office in 1895; to achieve it he had worked through the Boer War and the Khaki Election. By the summer of 1902, it still had not been accomplished. Britain’s largest dominions, Canada and Australia, were secure and prosperous, but they were becoming independent. Their people still thought of themselves as subjects of the British Crown, but as Australian or Canadian subjects, not British subjects. “Colonies,” wrote Robert Jacques Turgot, the eighteenth-century French economist and finance minister, “are like fruits1 which cling to the tree only until they ripen.” Chamberlain concluded that the colonies needed incentives to remain attached to the Empire and that the incentives most likely to work were commercial. He therefore proposed building a tariff wall around the British Empire. All competing produce and goods from foreign states bound for any part of the Empire would be taxed once they crossed the tariff wall. This would benefit farmers and manufacturers throughout the Empire and bind them more closely to the mother country. The Colonial Secretary further anticipated that customs duties levied on foreign goods entering the United Kingdom would provide government revenues to pay for the social reforms he advocated. Chamberlain named his plan “Imperial Preference.”

  Chamberlain thought the country was ready for his proposal: under an imperialist banner, the nation had won the South African war; on an imperialist platform, the Unionist Party had won the Khaki Election. Imperial Preference, he believed, would ride the same tide of Imperial feeling. Other factors seemed favorable. Lord Salisbury, always dubious of Chamberlain and his schemes, had stepped down and been replaced by Arthur Balfour. In August 1902, the Fourth Colonial Conference had met in London and, although it rejected Chamberlain’s suggestion that a Council of the Empire be formed, it passed a resolution favoring Imperial Preference. The British government was respectfully urged to grant preferential treatment to agricultural products and manufacturers of the colonies, “either by exemption2 from or reduction of duties now or hereafter imposed.” In fact, Great Britain’s historic adhesion to free trade had already been broken. In the 1902 budget, Conservative Chancellor Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had asked for and been given a small (one shilling per ton) duty on foreign cornfn1 imported into the United Kingdom. Its purpose was to raise revenue to pay for the Boer War, but Chamberlain saw its acceptance by the Cabinet and the House of Commons as a starting point from which he could advance. If the shilling duty were kept on foreign corn, while corn grown in the Empire was exempted, it would be the beginning of Imperial Preference.

  Chamberlain’s idea found immediate favor with a faction of the Unionist Party: protection for British industry had long been a demand of the businessmen of the Conservative Party. But free trade remained an article of faith of many Tories and all Liberals. Indeed, Britain’s attachment to free trade had been unchallenged by any major political figure since Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1848. Hicks-Beach’s small duty on corn was explained and accepted as a war tax only, to be lifted as soon as the end of the war made extra revenues unnecessary. To many in Parliament and the country, use of this temporary tariff as the first step in erecting a permanent tariff wall was a breach of promise and of Britain’s tradition of free trade. In launching his crusade for Imperial Preference,
therefore, Joseph Chamberlain was challenging history, as well as upsetting party alignments. Before the battle was over, he would split the Unionist Party over free trade as dramatically as, twenty years earlier, he had split the Liberal Party over Home Rule.

  Imperial Preference was not the only matter on Joseph Chamberlain’s mind in the summer of 1902. “Joe’s war” had finally ended in May, and the Colonial Secretary was planning a visit to South Africa to investigate personally the problems of reintegrating the Boer republics into the Empire. While there, he also hoped to persuade the wealthy Transvaal Uitlanders to contribute £30 million towards the cost of the war. He was to be away for four months, leaving England in November, staying through the South African summer, and returning home in March. Before leaving, he wanted the Cabinet to confront the issue of Imperial Preference, at least to the extent of deciding to retain the corn duty imposed by Hicks-Beach. The Cabinet met on October 21 and discussed the corn duty, but Chamberlain’s proposal that it be the first step towards introducing the broader program of Imperial Preference was vigorously opposed by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Ritchie. Balfour’s report to the King of the Cabinet’s deliberation was drafted in careful language. “It was suggested,”3 the Prime Minister wrote, “that, while retaining the shilling duty on corn as regards foreign importation, our Colonies should be allowed to import it free. There is a very great deal to be said in favor of this proposal. But it raises very big questions indeed.... On the whole, Mr. Balfour leans towards it, but it behooves us to walk warily....”

  The Cabinet met again on November 19, a week before Chamberlain was to sail. Ritchie repeated his protest and handed his colleagues a confidential memorandum opposing Chamberlain’s design: “Let us first be quite clear4 what preferential treatment involves. It involves the imposition of a charge on the taxpayers of the United Kingdom in order to benefit our kith and kin beyond the sea. Don’t let us be under any delusion about that....” Balfour, presiding, remained above the battle. The other ministers, turning their heads first to Chamberlain, then to Ritchie, kept silent. Chamberlain left the meeting convinced that he had the majority and that, in time, he might win over even Mr. Ritchie. In any case, it was agreed that, while he was away, the issue would be suspended and a final decision made only before the budget was presented to the Commons the following spring. The Colonial Secretary’s impression of victory in principle is borne out by the Prime Minister’s report that night to the King: “The Cabinet finally resolved5 that... they would maintain the corn tax but that a preferential remission of it would be made in favor of the British Empire.”

  During the four months the Colonial Secretary was away, Ritchie worked feverishly to reverse the Cabinet decision and do away with the shilling corn tax in the new budget. Armed with Treasury statistics, he pressed his Cabinet colleagues to reconsider their views. Early in March, before Chamberlain’s return to England, the Chancellor asked Balfour to schedule a meeting and put the budget before the Cabinet. The Prime Minister, distressed to find his Chancellor and his Colonial Secretary still on a collision course, refused Ritchie’s request and through Chamberlain’s son, Austen, warned the Colonial Secretary, then aboard a ship approaching Madeira. Chamberlain considered his South African journey a success. He had toured the country, visiting Durban, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, making speeches and interviewing leaders of all parties; his only setback had been his failure to collect £30 million from the Uitlanders. Although disturbed by the message he received in Madeira, he arrived in Southampton on March 14, 1903, determined to press the Cabinet for maintenance of the corn tax as a first step to Imperial Preference.

  At the Cabinet meeting three days later, on March 17, Ritchie demanded that the corn tax be abolished. Forewarned, Chamberlain was not surprised. What did surprise him was discovering that a majority of the Cabinet now seemed to favor the Chancellor. Balfour again did not take sides. He did not overrule Ritchie because he did not wish his new Chancellor to resign on the eve of his first budget presentation. Playing for time, the Prime Minister concentrated on mollifying Chamberlain, promising that if Ritchie were allowed to have his way with the budget in the Cabinet, the summer would be used to investigate and further analyze the matter. Chamberlain bowed and admitted that “there was no time to fight6 the question out in the Cabinet before the Budget had to be introduced.” The budget Ritchie presented to the House on April 23 was a pure free-trade budget, and the Chancellor defended it with a full-blooded free-trade, free-food argument: “Corn is in a greater degree7 a necessity of life than any other article... it is the food of our people....”

  While Ritchie spoke, Chamberlain sat quietly. He maintained his silence for another three weeks. Then, on May 15 at Birmingham Town Hall, before his speech, he turned to the chief organizer and said grimly, “You can burn your leaflets.8 We are going to talk about something else.” He began by apologizing that while doing the Empire’s business in South Africa his “party weapons9 had become a little rusty.” “In the calm which is induced by the solitude of the illimitable veldt,” he had found himself looking beyond the petty issues of the day. He asked his audience to contemplate the glorious future of the British Empire: today, 40 million subjects in the United Kingdom; overseas, 10 million. One day, these 10 million would be 40 million. Did his audience wish these millions to continue in “close, intimate, affectionate” bond with the mother country or to break away and become independent nations? In preventing the disintegration of the Empire, “the question of trade and commerce is of the greatest importance.” To achieve the promised glory of the Empire, Great Britain must favor its colonies by a policy of Imperial Preference. This question, he announced, must be an issue at the next General Election.

  Balfour and Cabinet were stunned. On the very day that Chamberlain spoke in Birmingham, the Prime Minister was assuring a protectionist delegation in London that it was not the proper time to introduce Imperial Preference. Balfour recovered quickly enough to tell the press that Chamberlain’s address was “a great speech by a great man.”10 On May 28, Chamberlain repeated his challenge in the House of Commons. He was roundly cheered by many Unionist backbenchers and hooted by the Liberals while his colleagues on the Government Front Bench sat silent. Outside the Commons, other leaders of the Unionist Party, including the Duke of Devonshire, Lord President of the Council, who eighteen years before had joined Chamberlain in deserting the Liberal Party over Home Rule, now sided against the Colonial Secretary. The lines between free trade and protectionism were being drawn. “From that point on11 until the General Election of 1906,” said H. H. Asquith, “it became the dominating issue of British politics.”

  The Prime Minister, who stood in the middle, pleaded for calm. “Chamberlain’s views...12 commit no one but himself. They certainly do not commit me,” he wrote to the Duke of Devonshire on June 4. He suggested to his Cabinet colleagues that “for the present13 it shall be agreed that the question is an open one and that no one stands committed by any statement but their own.” His first speech to the Commons on the subject, delivered on June 10, followed this noncommittal path. He announced that he had not made up his own mind and therefore refused to take sides between free trade and Imperial Preference. To the House’s astonishment, Balfour boldly ascribed his indecision—clearly an effort to keep both wings of his party in harness by criticizing neither—to moral rectitude and political wisdom: “I should consider14 that I was ill-performing my duty—I will not say to my Party but to the House and to the country—if I were to profess a settled conviction where no settled conviction exists.” The Liberals hooted. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, declared that it was intolerable that a British Prime Minister be without settled convictions on a fundamental issue of British politics. Sir Wilfred Lawson, a Liberal M.P., promptly scribbled a verse which circulated widely:

  I’m not for Free Trade,15 and I’m not for Protection

  I approve of them both, and to both have objection

>   In going through life I continually find

  It’s a terrible business to make up one’s mind

  So in spite of all comments, reproach and predictions

  I firmly adhere to unsettled convictions.

  For the Liberal Party, deeply divided by the Boer War, Chamberlain’s proposal provided a simple, telling issue: the Unionists stood for a tax on food. Even better, from the Liberal standpoint, the electorate soon would be treated to the sight of free-trade Unionists and protectionist Unionists attacking each other. “This reckless, criminal escapade16 of Joe’s is the great event of our time,” Campbell-Bannerman chortled, adding that “to dispute Free Trade... is like disputing the Law of Gravitation. All the old war horses about me are snorting with excitement. We are in for a great time.” Asquith instantly understood the implications: “On the morning of May 16, 1903,17 my husband came into my bedroom at 20 Cavendish Square with The Times in his hand,” Margot Asquith recalled. “‘Wonderful news today,’ he said, ‘and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep the country.’ Sitting upon my bed, he showed me... the report of a speech made at Birmingham the night before by Mr. Chamberlain.” Many Unionists also glimpsed what was to come. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, now a backbencher, warned, “Tariff Reform has united18 the Party opposite—divided for the last eight years—into a happy family. If persisted in, it will destroy the Unionist Party as an instrument for good.”

  Balfour’s delaying tactic had been to persuade the Commons to suspend formal debate on Imperial Preference until the Board of Trade ascertained the economic facts, compiled statistics, and presented analyses and recommendations. Privately, he begged his colleagues not to speak on the subject until the report was in. The Prime Minister could control the House, but not Unionists outside the House. In the House of Lords, Lord Goschen, the former First Lord, denounced Imperial Preference and praised free trade. On July 1, fifty-four free-trade Unionist M.P.’s, calling themselves the Unionist Free Food League, gathered to listen to fiery speeches by Lord Hugh Cecil—Lord Salisbury’s son—and twenty-eight-year-old Winston Churchill, who had won his seat in the Khaki Election three years before. Initially, Balfour’s delaying tactics succeeded. The Board of Trade assembled statistics in leisurely fashion and forwarded them to the Cabinet. Cabinet discussions drifted indecisively into August. On August 13, Parliament rose for the summer recess.