More clearly than most he sensed the beginnings of a transfer of power, not a mere political transfer from the in-party to the outs but one more profound, to a new class which, though as yet far from the possession of power, by its pressure on the possessors was causing upheaval in the components of society.
Meanwhile he had no seat. “I am certainly not going to go about the country explaining that I am honest and industrious like a second footman out of a place,” he remarked. A seat in the City of London being found for him, he returned to the House as Leader of the Opposition.
Others besides Balfour glimpsed in Liberalism’s victory the portents of its dissolution. To the Socialists this was the Marxian imperative. Robert Blatchford predicted that the Liberal party would try to carry out “a halfhearted policy in the hope of not estranging any of its moderate followers.” If they attempted really remedial social legislation they would lose the support of their capitalist backers, who would defect to the Tories. If they did nothing in social reform they would lose the support of the Radicals who elected them. In either case this would be their last Government. “The most certain of all aids to our cause is the inevitable disintegration of the Liberal Party.”
The Parliament of 1906 convinced the Tories of the rise of Socialism with its explicit threat to the existence of Privilege. Until now the landed aristocracy and squirearchy had believed that they could speak for the people, that their national interest was the same, that in that sense they were one. They believed in the benevolent working of Tory Democracy as long as it did not interfere with the existing order. They thought of the populace in terms of the rural and servant class whom they knew. George Wyndham, Chief Secretary for Ireland in Balfour’s Cabinet, a dithyrambic true-blue Tory who retained his seat in 1906, believed he had won, as he wrote his mother, “because the working men love me. I won by their hearts.… All my song has been the brotherhood of the Empire for us all, fair terms for the Foreigner, and the glory of Empire for our children with a little straight talk for Christianity in our schools.… I have opened my heart to all their hearts and we just love each other. I won on Toryism, Empire and Fiscal Reform. The Irish voted for me, the Fishermen voted for me, the Soldiers voted for me, the Artisans voted for me! Simply because we liked each other and love the traditions of the past and the Glory of the future.”
Wyndham’s charming Eighteenth Century picture, whatever the case in his own constituency, was for England, as for the rest of the world in 1906, as dead as the Prince Regent. The agricultural class was disappearing, seeping into the cities, and between the industrial proletariat which was replacing it and the patricians, there was no love or common interest. Wyndham and his kind knew nothing of miners and millhands and people who lived in long monotonous rows of urban houses. “Fancy,” said Winston Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace, when canvassing with a friend in Manchester they entered a particularly drab street, “living in one of those streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever!” The partakers of that fate were the new voters.
Among the 377 Liberal M.P.’s, 154, or 40 per cent, were businessmen, 85 were barristers and solicitors, 69 were “Gentlemen,” 25 were writers and journalists, 22 were officers and the remaining 22 included university professors, teachers, doctors and champions of causes. Among the defeated Tories the largest category was still Gentlemen, representing 30 per cent, followed by businessmen at 25 per cent and officers 20 per cent. Almost half the House, to the number of 310, were new men who had never sat in Parliament before. A noble lord on visiting the newly assembled body was relieved to find that few were in “unconventional dress,” but Punch’s veteran correspondent Sir Henry Lucy found the tone, character and social behavior of the House “revolutionized.” The Irish were a rough group notable for bad manners which they exercised deliberately, uncowed by the traditions of the House. Since it was English they hated it, and since the Liberal majority had no need of them, they had no bargaining value and could do little but take out their frustration in noise and nuisance value to impede any legislation that was not Home Rule. Their old, hard-fought, ever-foiled battle to unseat English rule and govern themselves was not helped but swamped by the size of the Liberal victory.
When Balfour returned, the hostile majority openly showed their dislike of him as leader and symbol of the defeated party. New members, according to Austen Chamberlain, were “intolerant and rude to him … jeered at him and constantly interrupted him.” Unmoved, debonair as ever, he remained master of debate and was able within a year to re-establish his ascendancy and win the respect of his opponents who “felt he gave distinction to the House.” Although many of the new Government were his personal friends, the man who sat in his old place, facing him across the Speaker’s table, was not. Campbell-Bannerman was impervious, as a colleague said, to the “historic charm” of Balfour; “he simply could not see it.” Early in the session he tried to puncture its spell. Required to state his party’s position on a resolution against Tariff Reform, Balfour managed an evasion as ambiguous as of old, exasperating the Prime Minister. “Enough of this foolery!” C.-B. burst out. His predecessor was “like the old Bourbons—he has learnt nothing. He comes back with the same airy graces, the same subtle dialectics, the same light and frivolous way of dealing with a great question but he little knows the temper of the new House of Commons if he thinks these methods will prevail here. I say enough of this foolery!” It was a doughty effort, widely quoted, but it did not dispel the Balfour aura.
The real temper of the new House was represented by a different kind of man than either Balfour the patrician or C.-B. the old-fashioned Liberal. The two dominant figures of the new Government, each of whom was to serve in succession as Prime Minister, were both men for whom government was not an inherited function but a professional career. They were H. H. Asquith, son of a Nonconformist Yorkshire wool merchant, and David Lloyd George, son of a Welsh schoolteacher. In background and temperament totally dissimilar, they had both made their way to Parliament through the practice of law.
The most dynamic of the new ministers, Lloyd George had been named President of the Board of Trade, not one of the chief Cabinet posts but one that gave him Front Bench rank. In him A. G. Gardiner, editor of the Daily News and a particularly perceptive student of political character, saw “the portent of a new age—the man of the people in the seat of power.” If not yet in ultimate power, Lloyd George was obviously on his way to it and his purpose was as clear as that of a fox in a hen coop. He was forty-two, eleven years younger than Asquith and eleven years older than Churchill. Sent to Parliament in 1890 by a borough in Wales in the cause of Welsh nationalism, he was a Nonconformist dedicated to Disestablishment and a Radical dedicated to social reform. His political bible as a young man was Les Misérables, which he carried with him in a shilling paper edition whenever he traveled. His stand against the Boer War at the risk of professional boycott and actual assault took moral as well as physical courage. He had strong political principles but no scruples. Small and handsome, fearless, ruthless, and honey-tongued, with bright blue eyes, brown moustache and intense vitality, he constantly pursued and attracted women and adroitly avoided the occasional legal consequences. As a public speaker he was the Bernhardt of the political platform who ravished audiences with Celtic lilt and strong emotion. In public no rhetoric for him was too theatrical, no rabble-rousing too extreme; in office, however, he was circumspect and shrewd, conscious, as he used to say, that “England is based on commerce,” and that no party could live by appeal to Labour alone. His greatest gift was an acute, intuitive, unerring sense of what the moment demanded, coupled with the conviction that he was the man to supply it. He “swooped down on opportunity like a hawk,” and with it in his grasp, was a man whom the party leaders could not choose but use, even if like Chamberlain among the Tories, he was a cuckoo who would use them.
Ahead of him as Chancellor of the Exchequer was Asquith and coming up fast from
behind, Winston Churchill, who had been given a sub-Cabinet post as Under-Secretary for the Colonies in reward for coming over from the Tories. Asquith was a professional intellectual machine who worked by training and judgment of what was expedient rather than by any fundamental primal belief. He was implacable in logic, irrefutable in debate. “Go and bring the sledgehammer,” ordered C.-B. on one occasion when Balfour was delicately slitting the Liberals to ribbons, and Asquith was duly sent for. A brilliant First at Oxford, to which he had won a scholarship, he was the finest product, wrote Gardiner, of the Balliol system, which avoids excessive zeal and “distrusts great thoughts even if it thinks them.” He understood everything and originated nothing. Firm but passionless he might have been a judge and was a perfect chairman of the board. After a successful early career as a barrister, he no sooner became a Cabinet minister under Gladstone in 1892 than he was marked as the coming man even though he was so unaccustomed to Society that he used to give his arm to his own wife to take her in to dinner. That difficulty was rectified when she died and Margot Tennant, with an eye for coming men, decided to marry him. He fitted smoothly into the elite; he “has no egotism, no jealousy, no vanity,” said a woman friend. He dominated by intellect but he did not excite or stir reaction. The public could never form a picture of or pin a label on him and he remains for history a man without a face.
The Government included a number of peers, none of them great landowners, among whom were the aged Marquess of Ripon, who later resigned, Lord Tweedmouth, who became mentally “unhinged” and also eventually resigned, and Lord Crewe, Rosebery’s son-in-law, who “horrified” the current Prince of Wales (later King George V) by his habit of wearing a jacket instead of a morning coat in the House of Lords. The only representative of the great aristocracy was the renegade Tory, Winston Churchill. Not Free Trade alone had brought him over to the Liberals. By 1904 when he changed parties he knew the Tories were on their way out. Craving office, he did not want to wait and besides he could not afford to. Although the grandson of a duke, he had to make a living. Journalism and authorship would pay but not with the kind of opportunity he wanted. In America a man of his energy would have chosen business, but for an Englishman of his inheritance Government was the one career for the exercise of greatness.
Recognizing the challenge of the social problem, he believed the Liberals could meet it and he wanted to play a major share. Apart from ambition he was moved by his deep devotion and love for his old childhood nurse, Mrs. Everest. Through her he felt personally the fate of the old unemployed person, “so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives.” In 1904 he saw opportunity, seized it, made the right choice for the time and won his chance. From then on in all his speeches he preached Liberalism as the “cause of the left-out millions” to which the working class should attach themselves rather than to a destructive Socialism. Once in office he knew that unless the Liberals could win the trade-union vote away from the rising Labour party, they must eventually collapse. He set out to earn it, forming a team with Lloyd George to draft and enact legislation on wages and hours, pensions and social insurance. In a speech at Glasgow in October, 1906, he outlined a program virtually adopting the Fabian idea of a welfare state and far ahead of anything intended by the Government of which he was a minor member. “We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour,” he announced boldly and went on to propose the state as a “reserve employer” of labour, the establishment of minimum standards and state ownership of railways. Beatrice Webb was very gratified: “Winston has mastered the Webb scheme,” she noted in her diary, and having done that he could be classified as “brilliantly able.”
The most outright opportunist called forth to match the new times appeared in Tory ranks. He was F. E. Smith, a new M.P. aged thirty-three, who was one day to become Lord Chancellor under the name Lord Birkenhead. His maiden speech in 1906 was the most sensational parliamentary debut of his time. Like Asquith a barrister and self-made, he too had won a scholarship to Oxford, where, as a star of the Union, he learned every trick, gambit and lunge of debate. An adventurer without connections among the great territorial interests, he was prepared to fight his way up by intelligence, audacity, driving ambition and sheer gall. When he stood up to speak for the first time in the House of Commons amid the dispirited remnants of the Tory debacle, members saw “a young man, elaborately dressed, slim and clean-shaven with a long hatchet face, scornful eye and hair oiled and smooth.” Standing with his hands in his pockets and a look of contempt on his face, he began in a suave, self-assured voice a speech of “brilliant insolence and invective.” It was so biting in tone and practiced in delivery that listeners hardly noticed the lack of subject matter. The speech was a series of sneers, sarcasm and personal allusion tossed into Liberal laps like firecrackers. The Tories sat up, startled and delighted. When the speaker quoted a slightly twisted version of Lloyd George’s electioneering reference to Chinese slavery on the hills of Wales and Lloyd George interrupted from the Front Bench “I did not say that,” Smith was undaunted. “Anticipating a temporary lapse of memory,” he said smoothly, “I have in my hand the Manchester Guardian of January 16,” and after reading the quoted remark, added with thrilling insolence, “I would rather accept the word of its reporter than that of the right honorable gentleman.”
The whole performance was a triumph of calculated purpose. Smith saw that what was needed at that moment was attack to give heart to the defeated side. From then on he was a growing power. Lacking the keel of a considered philosophy of government, he traveled fast but without direction. His brains were as notable as Lansdowne’s manners; they went to his head, said Margot Asquith. Ideas and principles did not interest him but only the play of material forces, and he was supremely confident of his ability to manipulate them. A legend later went the rounds that when he was at Oxford he and Sir John Simon had tossed to decide which party each should join since no party could contain them both. While probably untrue, the fact that it was told and considered apt was indicative. After one of Churchill’s speeches addressed to the labour vote, Smith said publicly, “The Socialists had better not cheer the name of Mr. Churchill for he will most likely steal their clothes when they go bathing—if they do bathe, which I doubt.” It was a sneer of an unforgivable kind and one which meant a new kind of man was on his way up. Churchill’s retort, “Mr. Smith is invariably vulgar,” did not prevent them from becoming the best of friends.
Change of government re-established the terms of an old conflict. When the Liberals held the Commons, the Conservatives, if they felt really threatened, could fall back on the veto power of the House of Lords, as they had done in 1893 to block Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. Between the proponents of Change and the proponents of Things-as-they-are, between the policy of Reform and the policy of Hold-fast, another clash was bound to come, as Lord Salisbury had foreseen. Stating its essence he had said, “We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both Classes and Masses. This is especially difficult with the Classes because all legislation is rather unwelcome to them as tending to disturb a state of things with which they are satisfied.” When the disturbance became too threatening the House of Lords would balk, not because they were lords but as the reserve defenders of Things-as-they-are. Repeated use of the veto to block the will of the Commons would precipitate a constitutional crisis. “As long as I am there,” Lord Salisbury had said, “nothing will happen; I understand my lords thoroughly. But when I go, mistakes will be made: the House of Lords will come in conflict with the Commons.”
Balfour made the first move even before Parliament met. In a speech at Nottingham on the night of his electoral defeat he said it was the duty of all Conservatives to ensure that their party “should still control, whether in power or in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.” Asquith afterward saw in this a claim to reassert the power of the Conservatives through the House of Lord
s. Whether it was or not, the event soon followed. In April, 1906, the Liberal Government introduced a new Education Bill of their own to cancel the objectionable features of the Act of 1902. It abolished state support of denominational schools. At this the High Church party reacted as furiously as the Nonconformists had done in 1902. The issue was at once recognized as the opening of battle between the two Houses of Parliament. “Possibly the ministers feel,” wrote Lord Esher, “that all their legislation will be nullified by the House of Lords and the sooner they have to stand up and fight the better.”
Balfour, following his uncle’s line of thought, feared that the Lords would let themselves be provoked into making mistakes. He at once suggested to Lord Lansdowne, Conservative leader of the upper House, that the Government’s strategy would be to send up bills with more extreme provisions than needed, trusting to the Lords to amend or reject them until they had built up a case against themselves. Then the Liberals would appeal to the country for a mandate to limit the Veto. Never before, he warned, had the Lords been called on to play a role “at once so important, so delicate or so difficult.”
The tone of debate in the Lords on the Education Bill showed no sign of caution and their temper was not improved when they received from the Commons a Plural Voting Bill designed to end the ancient usage whereby owners of land in more than one constituency had more than one vote. “Something will happen,” said Lloyd George almost visibly rubbing his hands. “There will be a great game of football on that field before long, I can assure you.” In December, fulfilling his anticipation and Lord Salisbury’s foreboding, the Lords threw out both the Education and the Plural Voting Bills. Significantly, however, they did not interfere with the equally, if not more, unpalatable Trades Disputes Bill, although the Liberals would have been only too pleased if they had. This bill, reversing the Taff Vale judgment, had been introduced in the Commons and passed against the real wish of the Government and over the objections of several ministers because of the pressure of Labour joined by the Radical members. “We could not resist the numbers pledged to it,” Haldane, the Liberal Minister of War, admitted. Cautiously steered by Lansdowne, the Lords let the bill pass because they did not wish to antagonize the working class and cement its alliance with the Liberals.
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