by John Buchan
II
The King came back in February to a greyer but not more peaceful scene. I have called the years 1912 and 1913 the restless years, and in the retrospect they seem a period of continuous effervescence and ferment. Even at the time one was conscious of walking on unsubstantial ground. Behind all the self-confidence of prosperity there was a sense of impermanence, as if good things would not last, and black clouds were banking beyond the horizon. At home there was constant agitation, but not, as in the past, as part of a coherent and rational plan. Most of the clamour was apt to be episodic and unrelated, demanding specific things without troubling about what in the long run the effect might be. It seemed to be rather evidence of short tempers and jangled nerves than of serious purpose.
The difficulties with Labour were a case in point. The Government had done much to put the trade unions in a privileged position, and had overridden certain ancient common law principles for the purpose. On the day that the Lords passed the Parliament Bill the House of Commons decided upon the payment of members, a step admittedly taken in the interest of Labour. But Labour was not content, and presently the Government found itself compelled to depart from the old custom of letting the parties in an industrial dispute fight it out between themselves. People had been slow to realise the change in the temper of British Labour which had been coming in the previous decade. The cheap press had informed the working man of many things about which he had once been ignorant. He understood as never before the huge profits which capital was earning, and naturally desired a larger share. The Liberal victory in 1906 had excited his hopes. The bold experiments in social reform of the new Government had whetted his appetite. He had come to realise not only his needs and his rights, but his strength in combination. In every great industry there was a grumbling discontent — in the railways, in the cotton mills, among seamen and dockers and transport workers, above all in the coal mines. Strikes broke out like jets of steam from volcanic soil, and, however trivial the professed cause, they showed an ugly tendency to extend both their area and their purpose. The sympathetic strike was becoming more than an example of human camaraderie; it was proof now of the solidarity in purpose and spirit of great masses of men.
In the hot summer of 1911, at the height of the Agadir crisis, there had been a railway strike after twenty-four hours notice, a strike of both skilled and unskilled employees, for the Amalgamated Society and the Engineers and Firemen were acting along with the General Railway Workers. A strike was now a matter not of minor tactics but of grand strategy. This one was soon settled by the promise of a special commission of inquiry. But in March 1912 came something more serious, a miners’ strike for a national minimum wage, which, beginning in Wales, brought out more than a million men in the different coalfields. This was a new and disquieting thing, a nation-wide strike in a key industry, which if it continued might dislocate the whole of the country’s life. The Government, which might have been content to keep the ring in a local or sectional dispute, was compelled to interfere. Within a week it passed through both Houses a bill, which admitted the principle of a minimum wage and provided local machinery for fixing it, and the miners, not without difficulty, were brought back to work by the middle of April, having secured the larger part of their demands. Mr. Asquith, called to a novel task, had met it in a way which, he was satisfied, did not conflict with the Liberal creed. To fix a wage by act of Parliament would be an impossible paternalism, but it was another thing to provide the apparatus for fixing it by local and expert knowledge.
Yet no ingenuity could disguise the boldness of the innovation, and no optimism could blind thinking men to the dangerous pass to which the industrial world was hastening. Trade unions were becoming a power which might soon dictate harshly to the nation. There was theory behind it, the dogmas of syndicalism and Marxian socialism, and sober Englishmen were beginning to talk a strange jargon, but to the ordinary trade unionist doctrine had little to do with it. The plain fact was that he was becoming conscious of his strength, and resolute to use that strength to maintain what he considered to be his rights. He was beginning to see possibilities in direct action, for, if that caused not only loss of wealth to certain employers but a paralysis of the national life, then he could talk with any Government in the gate.
If Labour was becoming self-conscious, so was Capital. Alarmed by the Government’s social experiments and still more by the Government’s taxation, capital was tending to draw together its forces and to prepare for a pitched battle. There were many employers who, like Lord Devonport in the strike of the transport workers against the Port of London Authority in 1912, regarded all attempts at conciliation as futile, and desired to fight it out. Since Labour was inclined to be truculent in its demands, Capital followed suit in its answers. There was a good deal of futile talk of “smashing” the workers’ organisations before they had become too powerful, and in every dispute there appeared a new intransigence and bitterness. In a time of perfect peace industry seemed to be massing for a conflict, and already the metaphors of war were freely used.
Side by side with this class war had appeared the beginnings of a sex war. The illogical exclusion of women from votes had long been the subject of a decorous agitation which had effected nothing. Private members’ bills on the subject were respectfully discussed, and ruthlessly shelved. Now the advocates of women’s suffrage took to militant methods, and to their unanswerable dialectic added an attempt to make unworkable the government machine in which they had no part. These years furnished a spectacle of both heroism and folly, which, if it did not persuade an unsympathetic Cabinet, went far to make its life unbearable. No political meeting, no occasion of public ceremonial, was safe from the Suffragists’ interruptions, often farcical, but sometimes tragic. The cause found willing martyrs, and the hunger strikes of imprisoned women gave the Home Secretary an insoluble problem.
There has rarely been a more devoted body of agitators, and those who represented them as mainly neurotics and degenerates were far from the mark. The general emancipation of the sex and its admission to the universities and the professions had brought to the suffrage cause women of great ability and high attainments. Moreover, as the conflict continued, a curious thing happened; many women, who either detested militancy or cared nothing for the question, found themselves insensibly drawn by a kind of sex loyalty into sympathy. The result was the same as in industry; great bodies of human beings were slowly massed into opposition. At the time it seemed a terrible thing, but it had its value for the future. Who shall say that the discipline of the labour struggles did not do something to equip the British soldier for the field of battle, and the suffrage crusade train in self-reliance the many thousands of women who wrought so nobly in the War?
There was as little peace in Parliament as in the country. Mr. Lloyd George had indeed during the Conference of 1911 been in favour of a patriotic coalition Ministry, from which, if it would increase its usefulness, he was willing to be excluded. But with the breakdown of the Conference, party spirit revived in all its fury. In November of that year, Mr. Balfour, whose detachment had drawn much criticism from his followers, resigned the Conservative leadership, and was succeeded by Mr. Bonar Law, a middle-aged business man, who had never held Cabinet office. The change was not likely to increase the amenities of debate, for Mr. Bonar Law had none of Mr. Balfour’s urbanity, and on the major issue of Irish Home Rule he had the passionate convictions of a Scots Covenanter.
Home Rule was not the only anxiety of harassed Ministers. A bill to disestablish the Welsh Church, an old Liberal promise, was introduced in April 1912, and excited impassioned controversy and dismal forebodings; forebodings happily to be falsified by events, for the disestablished Church in Wales, under wise leadership, was to enter upon a fresh youth. The Insurance Act did not come into effect without many anxious moments for its projectors. In order to get the benefit of the Parliament Act for its measures the Government was compelled to work the House of Commons hard, and Parliament
sat continuously from February 14th 1912 to March 7th 1913, with only two months of a summer recess. The Opposition, with the Lords now in shackles and the Commons dragooned under a strict time-table, had some reason to complain that representative Government had become a farce, and that Parliament existed only to register the decrees of an autocratic Cabinet. There was a hair-trigger to the temper of both sides, and explosions and disorderly scenes were sadly frequent.
Nothing revealed the new bitterness in politics so clearly as the Marconi case, which in the autumn of 1912 blew up with the suddenness of a desert sandstorm. The Government were engaged in contracting with the Marconi Company for the creation of a chain of wireless stations. There was a rumour that Ministers had been dealing in Marconi shares, and it required a libel action against a French newspaper to make it clear that there had been no such speculation. What came out, however, was that three Ministers, the Attorney-General, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Whip, had received private information which encouraged them to invest in the American Marconi Company, a corporation which had no connection with the English one. The source of this information was the managing director of the English company. These Ministers, therefore, by accepting a tip from its manager, had put themselves under an obligation to a company which had with their Government a contract not yet settled, and still liable to be reviewed by two of the Ministers in their official capacity. The rumours grew so fierce that Mr. Asquith was compelled to appoint a committee to inquire both into the desirability of the contract and the conduct of the three Ministers. The committee reported in June 1913, and on the personal question announced that “all the Ministers concerned have acted throughout in the sincere belief that there was nothing in their action which would in any way conflict with their duty as Ministers of the Crown.” An Opposition motion in the House, condemning the want of frankness of the three, was easily defeated, and Mr. Asquith, in summing up, acquitted his colleagues of having infringed any “rules of obligation,” but considered that they had not fully observed the “rules of prudence” — which was indeed the common sense of the matter.
This “wretched subject,” as Mr. Balfour called it, is only worthy of mention as an example of a change in the standards both of controversy and of conduct. It was obvious that there had been no corruption, but equally obvious that there had been indiscretion. Yet the Opposition in the press and on the platform talked as if Britain were back in the worst days of the eighteenth century, and, more excusably, made play with the new order of the Little Brothers of the Rich, the spectacle of Ministers who had made a speciality of attacks upon idle wealth suddenly appearing among the candidates for that status. The Government’s supporters were equally extreme, declaring that there had been not only no corrupt motive, but no improper conduct, and one egregious newspaper announced that Mr. Lloyd George’s behaviour had in some mysterious way “sweetened and ennobled public life.” Some members of the Liberal party were gravely shocked by the whole business, and the gloss of earnest piety, with which Mr. Gladstone had once endowed their creed, was now patchy and tarnished. But to the great majority of the people it seemed a storm in a tea-cup — which was in itself a proof that private and public standards had declined. Fifty years before the Ministers concerned, however innocent their motives, would have found their careers at an end. Men had forgotten the words of Halifax the Trimmer: “An honest man must lose so many occasions of getting that the world will scarcely allow him the character of an able one.”
III
The irritation caused by the new taxes and the insurance scheme, and the impotent bitterness aroused by the Parliament Act, came to a head in April 1912, when Mr. Asquith introduced an Irish Home Rule Bill on Mr. Gladstone’s model. It differed from its predecessor in having more of a federal colour, being according to the Prime Minister only the first step in a comprehensive system of devolution for the whole United Kingdom. During the drafting of the Bill there was some talk of excluding the Protestant counties of Ulster for a certain number of years, but it was finally decided to omit this provision and to keep it as an ultimate bargaining counter. The measure was hotly debated for the better part of a year and did not pass its third reading till January 16th 1913. A fortnight later it was rejected by the Lords.
At first the line of the Conservative party was opposition to Home Rule of any kind for any part of Ireland. On this all sections of the party had always been agreed, and that summer took place the final fusion of the Conservative and Unionist wings. But there was an increasing number of federalists in its ranks, and had the Irish question been made part of a reasoned scheme of devolution there might well have been a split. Many of the younger men recognised the cumbrousness of the existing machine of government, and the need, while there was still the chance, of satisfying Catholic Ireland, the more so as it was clear that the new generation of Irishmen might soon fret under the old Nationalist leadership and follow darker counsels. The reason why the Cabinet, most of them federalists, did not attempt the larger scheme was the same as that which prevented them from essaying the reform of the House of Lords — the matter was too difficult and their time was too short.
But one fact kept the Opposition united, and overrode all the other criticisms of an ill-considered and ill-drafted measure. This was the whole-hearted opposition of Protestant Ulster. If Ulster’s exclusion from the Bill would be resented by the Nationalists, it was blindingly clear that her inclusion would be stoutly resisted by Ulster. In September 1912 the Ulster Unionists took time by the forelock, and began to recruit an Ulster Volunteer Force. That same month a solemn Covenant was signed by hundreds of thousands, pledging the signatories never to recognise a Home Rule Parliament in Dublin. Of this agitation the leader was Sir Edward Carson, formerly a law officer of the Crown. The Government were invited, and declined, to prosecute him for high treason, to which he would cheerfully have pleaded guilty. In February 1913 Mr. Churchill went to Belfast and could only speak under military protection. Civil war was apparently imminent so soon as the Parliament Act made the new measure law. Mr. Asquith might preach sweet reasonableness, and point out that it was absurd for a minority to dictate to a majority “upon an apprehension that at some future date they might be injured.” The taunt fell on deaf ears, both Ulster and British. “I can imagine,” Mr. Bonar Law declared, “no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to support her.”
The roots of Ulster’s suspicion, part racial and part religious, lay deep in history. That suspicion was beyond the reach of argument, since it was intertwined with the soul of a people who were perfectly ready to suffer for their convictions. They would not be put in subjection to another race, which they distrusted as Cromwell had distrusted it, and to a Church which they feared as Cromwell had feared it. If they were to be driven out of their birthright of British citizenship it would only be at the bayonet’s point. There could be no question about the grim reality of this resolve, and it was not confined to Ulster. I can remember as a young man, then nursing my first constituency in Scotland, feeling more deeply on the matter than I had ever felt in my life before about a public question. In the Scottish Lowlands there were thousands of signatories of the Ulster Covenant, and many a man there spent his last pre-War Sunday in the study of large-scale maps of County Tyrone. Now, if a serious and law-abiding people decide that a certain policy is so subversive of their principles and so fatal to their future that it must be met by armed revolution, it is usual for a democratic Government to call a halt and find some other way. But if the Government in its turn concludes that such resistance is factious and unreasonable and must be crushed, then it would appear to be its business to arrest the ringleaders and quell the movement. Mr. Asquith’s Government did neither. It allowed Ulster to raise and train an efficient army, and it went on with its Home Rule Bill — which was to make the worst of both worlds.
The Opposition could set out a damaging case. This was not the honest attempt at constitutional reform
on the lines of devolution, the need of which it was hard to gainsay. It was an ancient Liberal scheme, in which till the year before Liberals seemed to have lost interest. It had been revived only as part of the Budget bargain. It had never been directly put before the electorate, for the last election had been fought on the House of Lords question with echoes of the Budget. It could not be maintained that Britain as a whole had spoken with a clear voice, and yet it was for this antique relic, most inadequately sanctioned, that the Government proposed to run the risk of civil war.
Ministers could only reply that the deferring of Ireland’s hopes would not lead to peace, but they were conscious of the extreme difficulty of the situation, and all the year 1913 was spent in private efforts to negotiate. Unhappily both sides had begun by stating their case so intransigently that compromise was difficult. The King laboured to bring them together; in the early autumn Lord Curzon and Mr. Bonar Law were at Balmoral, and later the Prime Minister had conversations with the latter and with Mr. John Redmond and Sir Edward Carson. Mr. Redmond saw great difficulties in the exclusion of Ulster, but he was prepared to give her local autonomy and privileged representation in the new Irish Parliament. Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law were determined upon exclusion at the start, at any rate, of the four north-east counties as well as Tyrone and Fermanagh. To this Mr. Redmond at first would not agree, but before the end of the year he was willing to allow the Protestant Ulster counties to exclude themselves by plebiscite for a term of years. Sir Edward Carson, who on the matter was at once shrewder and more conciliatory than Mr. Bonar Law, required that no inclusion should be contemplated at any date except under some general scheme of devolution sponsored by the Imperial Parliament. By the end of the year something had been gained, in that the question was no longer a blank negation of Home Rule in any form, but the exclusion from the scheme of Ulster or some part of it permanently or for a time. The atmosphere was clearer, and the outlook had at least a ray of hope.