Put off again and again by Asquith’s promises to carry through Enfranchisement, which he made to secure quiet and never kept, the feminists in the years after 1909 slashed pictures in the National Gallery and set fires in cricket pavilions, race-course grandstands, resort hotels and even churches. They interrupted services in St. Paul’s and Westminster, forced petitions on the King at court, engaged in “painful and distressing” struggles with police, forcing their own arrest and imprisonment. They endured starvation and pain with mad fortitude, invited humiliation, brutality and finally, when Emily Davidson threw herself under the hoofs of the horses in the Derby of 1913, even death. Although these extremes were not reached until the period 1910–14, the practice and the spirit were already strong by 1909.
Men, otherwise decent citizens, reacted in the ugly spirit of a Saturday night drunkard beating his wife. When a meeting addressed by Lloyd George in the Albert Hall in December, 1908, was broken up by militants who, shouting “Deeds not words!” tore off their coats to reveal themselves dressed in prisoner’s gowns, the stewards, according to the Manchester Guardian, “went mad with fury and rushed upon the women, ejecting them with nauseating brutality, knocking them against seats, throwing them down steps, dragging them out by the hair.” In other instances of the kind they were deliberately struck in the breast. Possibly the fury was provoked by woman’s abandonment of feminine lures and her substitution of attack as a means of gaining her desires, which seemed to unsex her. It touched fundamentals. “These termagants, these unsexed viragoes, these bipeds!” thundered a Nonconformist minister, expressing more than all the editorials. The strange physical fury generated by the women’s struggle for the vote was the most unsettling phenomenon of the Liberal era.
By 1909 a gathering pessimism converged upon the Liberals and those allied with them. “A thousand sad and baffling riddles” had somehow replaced the simple verities of politics, wrote Masterman, now a member of the Government as Under-Secretary of the Home Office. In 1909 he published The Condition of England, a book of profound discouragement. He saw the world divided vertically “between nation and nation armed to the teeth” and horizontally between rich and poor. “The future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity at best appears as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock beaten by wind and wave; we cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning.”
Around him Masterman saw a complacent society reposing in an illusion of security but “of all the illusions of the opening of the Twentieth Century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security.” Instead of security he saw “gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents … vast implements of destruction placed in the hands of a civilization imperfectly self-controlled” in which “material advance has transcended moral progress.”
James Bryce, another member of the Liberal Government as Chief Secretary for Ireland and since 1907 as Ambassador to Washington, found discouragement in the central theme of his life, the democratic process. In a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in 1909 on “Hindrances to Good Citizenship,” he admitted that the practice of democracy had not lived up to the theory. The numbers who could read and vote had increased twenty times in the last seventy years but “the percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage.” The “natural average man” was not exhibiting in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy had presumed he possessed. He was more interested in betting at the races than in casting his vote. Old evils of class hatred, corruption, militarism, had recurred and new evils emerged. Although the world was undeniably better off than it had been, the faith of the Nineteenth Century in the ultimate wisdom of government of the people, by the people, had met “disappointment.” For the man who once described himself as “almost a professional optimist,” the Yale lectures were a painful confession.
The philosophers of Liberalism, looking around them, were making the equally painful discovery that laissez-faire, essence of the Liberal creed, had not worked. It had produced the evils of sweated labour, unemployment and destitution which Liberalism, unready for the wholehearted state intervention of the Fabian dream, could not cope with. In three years of office the Liberal Government, after coming to power in a new century with the greatest mandate in party history, had not been able to give shape to the great promise of 1906. By 1910 the number of men involved in strikes was the highest for any year since 1893. “We began slowly to lose what we had of the confidence” of working people, admitted Haldane, and “this gradually became apparent.” J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse, the economic and moral philosophers of social planning, had come to the conclusion that neither man nor society was operating properly. In The Crisis of Liberalism, published in 1909, Hobson wrote that if Liberalism could not transform its role into a more positive one, then “it is doomed to the same sort of impotence as has already befallen Liberalism in most continental countries.”
Hobhouse and a number of other investigators were concerned with man’s curious refusal to behave rationally in what seemed his own best interest. The low level on which the populace reacted politically, the appeal of the sensationalist press and the new phenomenon of mass interest in spectator sports were disturbing. Henri Bergson’s idea of man as moved by a force which he called élan vital had stimulated a new science of social psychology to probe the role of emotions and instinct as the basis of human conduct. One of the most influential of English studies of the mental processes at work in public affairs was Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction, published in 1904. An Oxford don whose deep interest in the labour movement led him to leave the University for the staff of the Manchester Guardian, Hobhouse found that the average man “has not the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time.” His opinions faithfully reflect “the popular sheet and shouting newsboy.… To this new public of the streets and tramcars it is useless to appeal in terms of reason.”
This was the public which had shouted “Pigtail!” and the phenomenon of herd behavior suddenly was recognized as an entity. The Columbus of this discovery was a surgeon, Wilfred Trotter, who named the phenomenon, gave it status as a subject for scientific study and quietly concluded his first voyage in sociology with a sentence as pessimistic as any ever written. “A quiet man,” as a friend described him, with a wide variety of interests in philosophy, literature and science, Trotter, who was 36 in 1908, was to be judged thirty years later “the greatest surgeon of the present century in this country.” He had “the head and face of a scholar redeemed from austerity by a smile of great charm and sincerity.” In his two essays on “The Herd Instinct” in the Sociological Review in 1908 and 1909 he found man’s social behavior springing from that same dark and sinister well of the subconscious whose uncovering marked the end of the Victorian age. He saw the subconscious as a force lacking “all individuality, will and self-control.” It was “irrational, imitative, cowardly, cruel … and suggestible.” Because of man’s innate desire for group approval, he is at the mercy of this irrational force and vulnerable to the herd reaction. Unlike Kropotkin who in Mutual Aid assumed the herd instinct to be benevolent, Trotter considered it a factor for danger because its operation was unconscious and irrational. “It needs but little imagination to see,” he concluded, “how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of nature’s failures.”
The herd instinct occupied two other investigators in 1908, William McDougall in Social Psychology and Graham Wallas in Human Nature in Politics. Wallas’ life and thought were directed toward The Great Society, the title of a book he published in 1914. With Shaw and the Webbs he was the fourth of the Fabian junta until he resigned in 1904 in protest against its support of Tariff Reform. A member of the LCC, chairman of the London School Board, a founder of, and professor of political science at, the London School of Econo
mics, Wallas in his own words was “a working thinker.” He was described by Wells as a “rather slovenly, slightly pedantic, noble-spirited man” in moustache and pince-nez whose lectures, though slow and fussy, were “penetrating and inspiring.” To another student, G. D. H. Cole, he was “the most inspiring lecturer I have ever heard.” In Human Nature in Politics he examined the evidence showing that man did not act according to rational assumptions. His hope was that the new methods of psychology and sociology would light the way toward more enlightened behavior in humanity’s self-interest.
Wallas did not want to accept the implications of Darwinism which seemed to condone and accept as inevitable the native aggressiveness of human nature and to condemn mankind to ruthless struggle as a condition of progress. Yet he foresaw that, unless the irrational was controlled, nations would engage in a series of inter-empire wars until only England and Germany or America and China remained, and then finally, after a “naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will exist” and the inhabitants of the globe, reduced by half, would have to begin all over again. Already the process seemed to be on the way with “Germany and ourselves marching towards the horrors of world war” merely because, having made entities of Nation and Empire, “our sympathies are shut up within them.”
Lloyd George’s Budget of 1909 was the fuse, deliberately lit, of one of the great quarrels which made the Liberal era, in the words of a participant, “so unprecedentedly cantankerous and uncomfortable.” With Liberal prestige sinking, party leaders were aware that without a popular issue they might not win the next election. People were already beginning to calculate, Gardiner wrote, “when the election would come and by how much the Liberals would lose.”
As Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George had to provide £16,000,000 of additional revenue for 1909, one-third toward the eight Dreadnoughts to which the Government had agreed, and two-thirds for implementing the Old Age Pensions Act. He chose to obtain it by a tax-the-rich program which, while neither unsound nor confiscatory, was framed as provocatively as possible with intent to goad the Lords to reject it so as to create an issue of Peers vs. People. The Budget raised the income tax on a graduated scale from 9d. to 1s. 2d. in the pound with an extra supertax of 6d. on incomes over £5,000. (Already when the Liberals’ first budget had raised the income tax to 11d. in the pound, a daughter of the Duke of Rutland recalled, “We all thought Papa would die. He looked too ashen to recover.”) The new Budget raised death duties to a maximum of 10 per cent on estates of £200,000 or over, it added a tax on motors and petrol which at this date affected only the rich, and also on tobacco and alcohol of which the last was to prove a political mistake.
It was none of these measures but a tax of one-fifth the value on “unearned increment” of land when it was sold or passed by death, plus an annual tax of a halfpenny in the pound on undeveloped land and mineral rights, which aroused the whole of the landowning class in furious resentment, as it was intended to. The land clauses required registration and valuation of property, which to the landowner was no less than the bailiff’s foot in the door, the State’s trespass on a man’s private property. Lloyd George pressed it home in public mockery and appeals to the populace as blatant as when Mark Antony wept over Caesar’s wounds. Personifying the enemy as “the Dukes,” he told a working-class audience of four thousand at Limehouse in London’s East End, “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts … is just as great a terror and lasts longer.” When the Government wanted money to pay for the Dreadnoughts, he went on, “we sent the hat around among the workmen. They all brought in their coppers.” Yet when “the P.M. and I knock at the doors of Belgravia” and “ask the great landlords to give something to keep the aging miners out of the workhouse, they say, ‘Only a ha’penny, just a copper’ and they turn their dogs on us and every day you can hear them bark.… It is rather hard that an old workman should have to find his way to the gates of the tomb bleeding and footsore through the brambles and thorns of poverty. We cut a new path for him, an easier one, a pleasanter one, through fields of waving corn.”
For a minister of the Crown it was a performance that no one but Lloyd George could have given without blushing. If the Prime Minister was embarrassed by it he gave no sign, a point which disturbed King Edward, who let it be known that he “cannot understand how Asquith can tacitly allow” speeches that would “not have been tolerated by any Prime Minister until the last few years.”
Furor exploded over the Budget exactly as its authors wished. Conservative leaders roared in protest. Lord Lansdowne called Lloyd George a “robber gull.” Mr. Chaplin denounced the Budget as the first step in a Socialist war against property, the Law Society declared a land tax unjust and unworkable, a meeting of City men headed by Lord Rothschild protested the valuation of property by “irresponsible tribunals” such as those which had “cost one Stuart his head and another his throne.” The Duke of Norfolk announced he would have to sell a Holbein which he had lent to the National Gallery, the Earl of Onslow put up for sale parts of his Surrey estate, and Kipling in a hysterical poem, “The City of Brass,” portrayed England riddled by hatemongers and crushed by tributes levied “on all who have toiled or striven or gathered possession,” until without a defender “it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!” No less a Cassandra, Lord Rosebery said the measure was “not a Budget but a revolution.” Underlying it was the “deep, subtle, insidious danger of Socialism” and Socialism was the “end of everything … of faith, of family, of property, of monarchy, of Empire.” His speech, addressed to a meeting of businessmen in Glasgow, was read next morning “with the greatest joy at every country house party in England, Scotland and Wales.”
A new Labour M.P., Philip Snowden, himself one day to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, said it was necessary to make the rich poorer in order to make the poor richer and the Budget was the beginning of democratic government. Balfour retorted that “you cannot abolish poverty by abolishing riches” and “let them not associate democracy with robbery.” The Duke of Rutland, close to apoplexy, proposed that all Labour M.P.’s should be gagged. As rage mounted, the King was forced to confess that the “foolish and mean speeches and sayings” of landowners and capitalists were causing immense harm.
Everyone including the common people was aware that the Veto, not the Budget, was the stake. When Minoru won the Derby that summer one man among the cheering crowd shouted, “Now King, you have won the Derby—go home and dissolve the bloody Parliament!” Churchill speaking at Leicester in September welcomed the struggle as likely to “smash” the Veto if the Lords rejected a Finance Bill. Balfour stripped the issue down to the land valuation clauses, which as “compulsory registration” were, he claimed, illegal in a finance bill; “How dare you describe it as a Finance Bill?” In fact, as Lord Salisbury had once pointed out over an earlier budget, there was no constitutional bar to the Lords throwing out a Finance Bill—only a practical one: they could not throw out the Government of the day along with it. To reject a budget and leave the Government in power would amount to deadlock. The Government’s recourse, if driven, would be to advise the King to create enough peers to provide a Liberal majority in the House of Lords, as many as five hundred if necessary, a deluge that would drown the hereditary peerage. Nevertheless the mood of the Conservatives was against compromise. Act boldly, said Lord Milner, and “Damn the consequences.” This, with Balfour’s concurrence and under his guidance, was the decision.
“The whole political world is convulsed with excitement,” wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary, as to whether or not the Lords would throw out the Budget. Debate opened in the House of Lords on November 22 and lasted for ten days. Peeresses and visitors, including the King of Portugal, packed the galleries, aged peers came down from the country who “could not even find their way to the Houses of Parliament”; altogether four hundred members took their seats, the largest number to assemble since the rejection of Home Rule. Noble members, f
rom the ancient ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, to young Lord Willoughby de Broke, spokesman of the country group, proclaimed their duty to the country to reject the Bill. As a Liberal, Lord Ribblesdale admitted his distaste for Lloyd George as “half pantaloon, half highwayman,” but he did not see anything really socialistic about the Budget, nor did he think the country would be seriously affected by “the sobs of the well-to-do.” If it came to a division he would vote with the Government.
Lord Rosebery, after all his horrors, advised passing the Budget rather than risk “the very existence of a Second Chamber.” The climax was Lord Curzon’s speech, which one deeply moved peer said was the finest ever heard in the House in forty years. The Government, Curzon said, proposed to introduce any measure it liked and, provided it could be covered with the label of a Finance Bill, force the Lords to pass it—“a revolutionary and intolerable claim” amounting to Single Chamber government. Despite the consequences, he advised rejection in the hope of bringing about a reformed House of Lords acting as an “essential feature” of the Constitution and not “a mere phantom rendered equally impotent and ridiculous.”
The division was called on December 1, 1909, the Lords filed solemnly into the lobbies, the vote to reject was 350–75. Next day amid loud enthusiasm in the Commons, the Prime Minister, declaring a breach of the Constitution had taken place, announced the Government would appeal to the country and called for a dissolution. Customarily recumbent on the Opposition Front Bench, Mr. Balfour, who had a cold, coughed, tapped his chest, took a pill and sniffed a restorative.
While preparing for the new election, Asquith’s Government drew up a Parliament Bill for abolition of the Lords’ Veto which they expected to introduce upon being returned to office. It provided that on bills certified by the Speaker as Finance Bills the Veto should be abolished and that other bills, if passed by three successive sessions of the Commons, should become law with or without the consent of the Lords. Talk flew around London about creation of peers; everyone from poets to tea merchants, “even Hilaire Belloc,” as Wilfrid Blunt noted maliciously, saw visions of the coronet descending upon his own head. Asquith meanwhile dropped hints of guarantees already secured from the King which were without foundation.
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