by John Buchan
Many causes had contributed to the Liberal victory of 1906 — satiety with a party which had fought a costly and not very glorious war; fear of the new protectionist crusade and its effect on the cost of living; dislike of the Chinese labour experiment in South Africa. But one potent reason was that historic Liberalism, repressed since 1895, now for the last time mustered its forces. Its devotees, chiefly older men who had known Mr. Gladstone’s spell, held their creed with an almost religious fervour. Its articles were the maintenance of free trade, disestablishment, free and non-sectarian education, Irish Home Rule, temperance, peace, and a modest social reform. To the advocacy of these large aims it brought a long tradition of expert electioneering. It was hostile especially to Mr. Balfour’s Education Act of 1902, which permitted rate aid to denominational schools; a somewhat narrow margin of dispute which Mr. Balfour ironically described as an identification of “the frontier which eternally separates right and wrong with the transient line which technically distinguishes local from national taxation.”
The new Government was not fortunate in meeting the wishes of its oldest and most loyal supporters. Chinese labour was indeed brought to an end, and this necessarily led Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to devise and carry through the greatest achievement of his career — the grant of self-government to the new South African colonies, which in 1909 was followed by an Act establishing the Union of South Africa. But the Education Bill to redress Mr. Balfour’s wrongdoing was rejected by the Lords. A Plural Voting Bill was rejected by the Lords, a Licensing Bill was rejected, and other measures were cruelly emasculated. Only a Trade Disputes Bill, which restored peaceful picketing, safeguarded trade union funds, and took strikes out of the law of conspiracy, was permitted to pass by the Upper House on the not very defensible ground that it did not wish a quarrel with Labour. The Government with its huge majority was beginning to fall into discredit. Such a majority is apt to be a misfortune, for it is inclined to lead rather than to follow, and to keep it together means a strict attention to the prejudices of the often ignorant rank and file. It was necessary to win back respect by leaving the conventional rut — those ancient causes which woke enthusiasm only among elderly loyalists. Mr. Lloyd George came forward as the Great-heart to lead his party to the Promised Land. The reforms which he proposed could be embodied in a Budget, on which no House of Lords would dare to lay sacrilegious hands.
So in the Budget of 1908 a scheme of Old Age Pensions was included, and was duly passed into law. But in 1909 Mr. Lloyd George unmasked his full batteries. For his proposed system of sickness and unemployment insurance he needed money, and in his Budget of that year he proposed to raise the extra fourteen millions partly by an increase of the income tax, super-tax and death duties, and partly by taxes on undeveloped land and on land’s unearned increment. The Conservative party were stirred to fury. They did not confine themselves to criticism of the dubious land taxes, but denounced the whole programme as a policy of spoliation and a class vendetta; its only logical justification, they said, was the anarchist maxim that all property was theft; it was a wicked attempt to rouse a class war. Mr. Lloyd George did not conciliate his opponents by his methods of defence, which were mainly picturesque vituperation of the “haves” on behalf of the “have nots.” The serious argument for his policy — that the time had come when the State must concern itself more closely with the life of the citizen, and that the citizen must pay for it — a doctrine to which most thinking men consented — was scarcely heard in the hubbub; if it had been, it would have deeply disquieted many orthodox Liberals.
The House of Lords, after a good deal of heart-searching, rejected the Budget by a large majority, on the ground that it was not a measure to raise the necessary revenues for the year, but an attempt to work a revolution through a finance bill. The reason alleged by the Lords was intelligent enough, whatever may be thought of their tactical wisdom. Matters had now come to the point of crisis. The Upper House, so far from being an independent Second Chamber, was, it appeared, only an appanage of the Conservative party, which with its aid was always in power, whoever might be in office. It had already massacred a host of Liberal innocents, and now the cup of its iniquities was full. It had challenged the central and historic privilege of the House of Commons. An appeal to the country was necessary, and the Prime Minister made it clear that he asked from the electorate not only an approval of the Budget but a mandate to bring the Lords to reason. He carried a resolution in the House of Commons that their action was “a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons,” and in a speech at the Albert Hall he announced: “We shall not hold office until we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary to the legislative utility and the honour of the party of progress. . . . We are going to ask the electors to say that the House of Lords shall be confined to the proper objects of a second chamber. The absolute veto must go.” He was reverting to the scheme of a suspensory veto which John Bright had once fathered, and which in 1907 had been the subject of a resolution proposed by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
The election of January 1910 had an unexpected result. The Government majority, which in 1906 had been 356, was now only 124. Moreover, 82 of it were Irish, and, if the Irish voted with the Opposition, the Government would fall. Now the Irish had not loved the Budget, and, indeed, had opposed it on the second reading. In Great Britain the election had been fought chiefly on that Budget, no constituency showing much interest in the Lords question. The result was a mandate for Mr. Lloyd George’s policy, but only if the Irish supported it, and for that they must have their reward in the shape of a Home Rule Bill. No Home Rule Bill, however, would pass the Lords in their present form; therefore as a necessary preliminary the Second Chamber must be dealt with. For a week or two the fate of the Government hung in the balance. The Cabinet was by no means united, the Prime Minister desiring to confine himself to the suspensory veto, while other ministers were anxious to link this with Second Chamber reform. The Opposition had been presented with a formidable cry. The Lords were to be attacked not for their faults but for their virtues; they were the only barrier against secession, and their destruction was the price to be paid for the precious Budget to separatists who were otherwise hostile to Mr. Lloyd George’s adventure.
The danger was tided over. In early April the House of Commons carried three resolutions on the subject of the Lords and the first reading of the Parliament Bill which embodied them. The Irish having been thus appeased, the Budget passed through both Houses on April 20th, the Lords reserving their fire. The King’s death found Government and Opposition ordering their battle lines for a constitutional clash of the first magnitude.
III
Side by side with these heavy domestic preoccupations, Ministers from 1906 onward had to carry a burden of external cares — grave problems of foreign policy and defence. These for the most part had to be kept secret; they could not be shared with their followers or give opportunity for moving perorations.
Ever since the close of the South African War a certain satiety with overseas politics had fallen upon the British people. The dream of imperialism, the closer union of the British race in one great pacific commonwealth, had lost something of its glamour, tending to sink to a form of race chauvinism or a mere scheme of commercial protection. Imperialism had at its best meant a political vision extending beyond these shores, and, as it faded in popular esteem, the British people inclined more and more to be absorbed in internal problems. There had been a time in their history when, under Palmerston and Gladstone and Disraeli, foreign affairs had been an integral part of their interests, and elections had been lost and won on diplomatic programmes. But for twenty years the doings of Europe had concerned them little. The imperialist who thought that Britain was an extra-European Power depending on the control of the sea, and the social reformer who regarded foreign policy as a lure to distract the nation from more urgent matters, had alike contributed to this result.
&nb
sp; In 1910 the people of Britain were less alive to the significance of what might happen beyond their borders than many a humble continental state. To an electorate excited by partisan warfare, dragooned by sleepless party caucuses, and scared or exhilarated by the prospect of large social changes, the husks of foreign policy were not acceptable. Warnings of the possibility of war were regarded as merely a trick to distract. Expenditure on defence was a waste of money which might be spent on objects from which there was a sound return. These things had no electioneering value, and the comfortable delusion was fostered that, so long as Britain chose to desire peace, peace would follow. There were men in the Government who to their honour refused to prophesy smooth things, but the cotton-wool with which the atmosphere was thick deadened their warnings.
Yet in a sense this public apathy was a fortunate thing, for it enabled weighty matters to be discussed, as it were, in camera. When King Edward ascended the throne Britain stood in a perilous isolation. She was disliked by Germany, suspected by France, and looked upon by Russia as the eternal enemy. When he died she had been brought again into the European family. By an alliance with Japan she had safeguarded her position in the Far East. There was an understanding with France, daily becoming more cordial, and one of the first acts of the new Liberal Government had been to authorise conversations between the British and the French army staffs with a view to collaboration should the need arise. The defeat of Russia by Japan had turned the mind of the former away from more distant parts of a globe where her interests might have clashed with ours, certain outstanding questions with Britain had been settled, and her alliance with France made her more complaisant towards a country which was France’s friend. Britain was now to all intents an associate of the Dual Alliance, though the fact was scarcely realised by the majority of her people. The Triple Entente had come into being.
We had entered the European game at a disturbed moment. The cat-fish in the pool was Germany. If she had discarded Bismarck’s policy, as well as the subtlety of his methods, the arrogant spirit of the Iron Chancellor remained. She felt, not without reason, that her dignity had been offended by the agreement between Britain and France which settled the questions of Morocco and Egypt without consulting her, and in the spring of 1905 Prince Bülow suggested to his master that the occasion had come for a dramatic coup to retrieve his country’s weakened prestige. On the last day of March in that year the Emperor landed with a retinue at Tangier, proclaimed the integrity of Morocco, promised the Sultan to defend his independence, and demanded that the whole Moroccan question should be reopened. A weak cabinet in Paris bent to the storm, M. Delcassé, the Foreign Minister, was sacrificed, and a conference of the Powers was summoned at Germany’s instigation. But for her the result was a bitter disappointment. She was revealed as, except for her faithful Austria, alone in the world; Italy deserted her colleagues of the Triple Alliance and supported her Latin neighbour; Britain and Russia stood solidly beside France. The Algeciras arrangement of April, 1906, provided no lasting settlement, but it made clear the new grouping of the European peoples. Germany had irritated and alarmed the world by showing too nakedly her hand. It was certain that she would look forthwith for fresh methods to satisfy her pride.
Her next coup was more adroitly handled. In the summer of 1908 the old regime in Turkey was swept away by revolution, the Young Turk party came into power, and by their liberal professions attracted for a little the sympathy of Western Europe. At first the change seemed against Germany’s interests, for she had sedulously cultivated the Hamidian Government, and would have to start again from the beginning. But she saw a chance of fishing profitably in the troubled waters. Austria seized the occasion to annex the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which she had long had the administration. Serbia was alarmed, for she saw her hope of union with the Bosnian Serbs extinguished. Russia, as Serbia’s protector, shared her annoyance at this annulment of the work of the Congress of Berlin, and Italy was disquieted by Austria’s advance into the Balkan peninsula. But Austria had Germany at her back, and the protests of the Triple Entente were received with a cool contempt. The Emperor William made his famous speech about Germany’s “shining armour,” and the Entente, unprepared for a European War in such a cause, had to acquiesce with the best grace it could muster. It was a proof of the strong foundations of the new friendship between France, Britain and Russia that it survived unimpaired so grievous a diplomatic defeat. The situation had been anxious, and Mr. Asquith told Mr. Balfour that he had never known Europe nearer to war.
The first German move had failed at Algeciras; the second had succeeded; the third was to end in a dangerous fiasco. It came in the spring of 1911. There had been a revolt in Fez and French troops had entered the city. To Germany it seemed that the Shereefian Empire was breaking up, and she was determined to share in the spoils. If France was to have the task of reconstructing the country, Germany must have territorial compensation; in the words of her Foreign Minister, “If one wants to eat peaches in January, one must pay for them.” The gunboat Panther was despatched to Agadir, and the German press claimed Western Morocco as their country’s right. But France in 1911 was not the France of 1905. M. Caillaux, who showed signs of temporising with Germany, was swept from power, and the new Ministry, under Raymond Poincaré, included Delcassé, who was not inclined to truckle to Berlin. Britain sent a warship to Agadir to lie alongside the Panther, and proclaimed in unmistakable terms her support of France. Germany, not yet ready for a world-war, abated her pretensions, and the Moroccan question was settled by various cessions of territory by France in Central Africa.
All through that summer, during the ceremonies of the Coronation and the bitter dispute about the Lords, Ministers had on their hands this controversy which presently might reach flash-point. There was a day in August when the crash seemed likely to come before the week was out. The affair had two important consequences. Hitherto it had been supposed, especially in Germany, that the Cabinet was not united in this matter, and undoubtedly a large section of the Liberal party was averse to any foreign commitments and suspicious of any increase in the national defences. But now the idol of this group, Mr. Lloyd George himself, announced to the world that a pacific Britain did not stand for peace at any price. In a speech at the Mansion House on July 21st he declared that “if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position which Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be threatened where her interests are vitally affected, as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.” These words revealed to an audience, which comprised his foremost critics, another side of the man; he was “varminty,” as an admiring sportsman put it, in other things than class warfare. The second consequence was that Germany was filled with a sullen fury against France, and not less against Britain, her ally. From that moment her war party dropped all talk of compromise and pursued naked aggression.
The burden of this foreign crisis, the duty of watching every move and of persuading an unwilling nation to prepare adequate defences, fell, apart from the Prime Minister, especially upon two men, Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Haldane, to whom was now added Mr. Churchill, the new First Lord of the Admiralty. Mr. Haldane, an enthusiast for German philosophy and letters, had, with the consent of King Edward, paid a visit to Berlin in the summer of 1906 to examine the possibility of a friendly understanding, and had reached the conclusion that, while there were dangerous forces at work within the German polity, the influence of the Emperor and his chief advisers was on the side of peace. To cherish this inclination and to nurse it into a steady warmth must be the object of Britain, and meantime at the War Office he laboured to make the British army a fit instrument for a task which might one day fall to it.
Sir Edward Grey worked to the same end. Representing a very
ancient and honourable type in British statecraft, the country gentleman with no vulgar ambitions who would have much preferred a private station, he had toiled in office to maintain the peace of Europe, and his grave simplicity of character, his moral dignity, and his gift of sound judgment and conciliatory statement had done much to keep the tottering fabric together. But no man was more conscious than he that he was treading a hazardous road. He was accustoming Britain to interfere in continental affairs when she was not armed on a continental scale, and when the whole trend of her immediate interests was away from national defence. If Germany chose to be arrogant he could not compel humility, for he had no adequate sanction behind him. To an ally he could not promise such immediate assistance as would enable her to speak with her foe in the gate. His arms were historical prestige, wealth, a great navy; but these were not quite in pari materia with those of the Powers with whom he thought to treat. He was a voice, a grave, reasonable, weighty voice, but behind it was not the appropriate weapon.
Ministers during the summer of 1911 might well have had wrung from them Lord Salisbury’s cry that “politics was a cursed profession.” They had on their hands a domestic programme which had evoked wild excesses of partisanship, and had attracted to them an odium from at least one-half of the people which had been unknown since the first Reform Bill. They were committed to a policy of constitutional change of which they could not foresee the end. And behind it all they saw a fermenting Europe, which promised perilous brews and deadly gasses, a Europe of which the larger part of their following was wholly ignorant — and must be kept ignorant, since a popular scare would beyond doubt kill all chance of a peaceful settlement. Mr. Churchill has well described the comfortless dualism of their lives.