by Roy Jenkins
“ You can burn your leaflets,” he had told the Liberal Chief Whip. “ We are going to talk about something else.” The confident arrogance of this statement was more than justified by the effect of the Birmingham speech. With an almost contemptuous ease, Chamberlain there set himself to show that, although Balfour might be Prime Minister, it was he who determined the course of politics. He began by dismissing the current subjects of dispute. In South Africa his “ party weapons had become a little rusty ” and he had returned in no mood to excite himself about matters like the Education Bill or temperance reform. Perhaps, he added sardonically, “ the calm which is induced by the solitude of the illimitable veldt may have affected my constitution.” The “ constitution ” of the Empire, he believed, was also in grave danger of being affected. Unless it could be held together by material ties, which meant preferential duties, it would inevitably disintegrate. The country had to choose between the fostering of imperial unity and “ an entirely artificial and wrong interpretation which has been placed upon the doctrines of Free Trade by a small remnant of Little Englanders of the Manchester School who now professed to be the sole repositories of the doctrine of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright"
He also advocated retaliatory duties against foreign countries, and this second proposal led later to his placing increasing reliance, as a prop to his argument, on the depressed condition of British trade.1 For the moment, however, it was the imperial argument which was to the fore, and Chamberlain made no effort to soften the conflict of ideas which was involved. “ If you are to give a preference to the colonies,” he said in the House of Commons a few days after Birmingham, “ you must put a tax on food.”
1 “Agriculture .. . has been practically destroyed,” he rather extravagantly declared at Greenock on October 7th. “ Sugar has gone, milk has gone, iron is threatened, wool is threatened. The turn of cotton will come. ...”
Asquith’s reaction to the Birmingham speech was immediate. “ On the morning of the 16th May, 1903,” his wife records in her autobiography, “ my husband came into my bedroom at 20 Cavendish Square with The Times in his hand. ‘ Wonderful news today,’ he said, ‘ and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep this country’. Sitting upon my bed he showed me the report of a speech made at Birmingham the night before by Mr. Chamberlain.”b This appraisal of the situation, which was to prove quite accurate, greatly increased Asquith’s interest in politics. At Doncaster on May 21st he delivered the first direct reply to Chamberlain, and in the House of Commons during that summer he tried hard and effectively to widen the breach between the Colonial Secretary and the other members of the Cabinet. This tactic paid excellent dividends. On September 9th Chamberlain sent a letter of resignation to Balfour, which a week later was accepted by the Prime Minister, who had in the meantime performed a balancing operation by shedding three Free Trade ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer.1 This development not only weakened the Government but also made it certain that Chamberlain, relieved of any restraints, would keep the issue, so disruptive for the Unionists and so unifying for the Liberals, continuously on the boil. It had become his only political raison d’etre.
1 A fortnight afterwards the Duke of Devonshire, whom Balfour had not intended to lose, insisted on following these Free Traders. He provided at least one exception to the categories of men whom Mrs. Asquith thought to be peculiarly susceptible to the heresies of protection. “ This caught on like wild fire,” she wrote, “ with the semi-clever, moderately educated, the Imperialists, Dukes, Journalists and Fighting Forces.” (Autobiography, 11, p. 53).
After his resignation Chamberlain at once embarked upon a programme of provincial meetings, expounding and amplifying his proposals. During that autumn he spoke at Glasgow, Greenock, Newcastle, Tynemouth, Liverpool, Cardiff, Newport and Leeds. Asquith also took to the platform. On October 8th he went to Cinderford in the Forest of Dean and there replied closely to the case which Chamber-lain had deployed on Clydeside on the two previous nights; and he followed this up during the next month with important speeches at Newcastle, Paisley and Worcester, each of which was a direct refutation of Chamberlain’s arguments. These speeches were all reported at length in the principal London and provincial newspapers, and the exchange assumed something of the nature of a gladiatorial contest, watched with close interest by politically conscious people throughout the country. Both sets of speeches were then collected and quickly published in pamphlet form. Chamberlain’s cost 1/- and were entitled Imperial Union and Tariff Reform. Asquith’s cost only 6d. (there Were fewer of them) and were entitled Trade and the Empire: Mr. Chamberlain s Proposals Examined.
Between them the two pamphlets rehearse most of the arguments of this old controversy. Chamberlain had the advantage of the initiative; Asquith was always in the position of replying to him rather than developing a positive case of his own. Chamberlain also had the advantage of being a greater master of the isolated memorable phrase. But in other respects Asquith was on top. He was always at his best defending a well-prepared position and picking out with a deadly destructiveness the intellectual weaknesses in a hastily prepared enemy attack. And this was the position in this dispute.1 Chamberlain, whose powers were perhaps already a little in decline, argued his case with most of his habitual clarity and with as many facts as he could assemble. But he did not carry Asquith’s intellectual guns. He knew no economics, and his command over the rules of logic was by no means as complete as that of his adversary. Nor was his knowledge of the factual background to the discussion always as reliable as Asquith’s. Here the latter’s voluminous memory and well-ordered mind was of great value. Despite the many other calls on his time he always gave the impression of being thoroughly prepared, in the sense not of carefully turned phrases but of stores of readily available information. A striking example is given by his official biographers. Chamberlain asserted that after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 the price of wheat during the next ten years was higher on the average than in the period preceding repeal. Asquith was immediately able to point out that repeal, while passed in 1846, did not take effect until 1849; that in the middle ’fifties prices were artificially raised by the Crimean War; but that between 1849 and 1853, the only years from which fair deductions could be drawn, the trend was sharply downwards.c
1 It is not without irony that the two issues on which the Liberal Party re-established its unity were both essentially conservative ones: the desire to preserve the 1870 status quo in education; and the desire to preservethe Cobdenite status quo in fiscal policy.
After a few weeks of this relentless shadowing Chamberlain began to show signs of nervous exasperation. At Cardiff, on November 20th, he fell back on that familiar resort of the intellectually worsted and claimed that Asquith was a remote lawyer with no business experience. Asquith replied sharply (if a little implausibly) that he would “ gladly defer to businessmen who understood and applied the rules of arithmetic.” This exchange was remembered and when the Chamberlain pamphlet came out at the end of the year Mrs. Chamberlain sent Asquith a copy inscribed “ From the Wife of a Man of Business— M.E.C.”—a gesture which combined good humour and prickliness in about equal proportions.
Asquith’s activities in this campaign did a good deal to restore his relations not only with the Liberal Party generally but with Campbell-Bannerman in particular. Bannerman had also been unusually active that autumn, making at least five platform speeches as against his normal ration of two. These had all dealt principally with the tariff reform issue, but in a way quite different from Asquith’s. They had not been directed so determinedly at the centre of Chamberlain’s argument, and they had not attracted quite the same degree of attention. But the leader showed no jealousy of his lieutenant. “ Wonderful speeches,” he wrote in November. “ How can these fellows ever have gone wrong? ”d 1 The praise was genuine and it was easy for Campbell-Bannerman to give it, for as its expression implies, he always treated Asquith as in a different category from himself, i
n no way subject to direct comparison.
1 The speeches were Asquith’s alone, but the “ fellows ” included his Liberal Imperialist associates, for whom (with the possible exception of Haldane) he seemed to be earning a sort of collective absolution.
The new issue also made House of Commons relations easier. There was no question any longer of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith leading different Liberal factions into different lobbies. Instead they could sit united watching Balfour turn and twist (and on a series of famous occasions in March, 1905 resort to the expedient of leading all his followers out of the House) in a desperate and skilful attempt to avoid the complete disintegration of his party. Nor did the Licensing Bill, the other great issue of the 1904 session, create any difficulty for the Liberals. This measure provided that where a licence was withdrawn, not because of misconduct, but on grounds of public policy, compensation should be paid; it was denounced by an united opposition as a brewers’ charter and a typical piece of Tory legislation.
Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that after Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech the Liberal leadership was miraculously freed of all friction and distrust. Differences had gone too deep for sudden healing. What happened in 1903 was that they were driven beneath the surface, but this was a great improvement on the previous position. In one sense, though, the apparently helpful issue of free trade provided a fresh cause of dissension. Amongst the Unionist majority in the House of Commons were a substantial group of “ free-fooders ” as they came to be called. A few of these carried their opposition to Chamberlain to the extent of joining the Liberal Party. The most notable was Winston Churchill,1 who crossed the floor in May, 1904; and the others included Sir Edgar Vincent (later Lord D’Abemon) and Sir John Poynder (later Lord Islington). But they were unrepresentative of the much greater number of Unionists who agreed with them on the issue but who did not elevate it above all other political questions. Education was an obstacle for some of these. Lord Hugh Cecil, for instance, combined a violent attachment to free trade with a high Anglican approach to voluntary schools. Even so, he was too much of a Cecil extremist to be typical. He wrote to Asquith in December, 1903, suggesting an amendment to the address which, he thought, would procure 30 Unionists in the Opposition lobby and 100 abstaining. But the men whom this was designed to catch were more cautious than he was himself. Nevertheless the prize of obtaining their support remained a dazzling one for the oflice-hungry Liberals. Herbert Gladstone as Chief Whip was instructed to explore the possibility of enticing them with unopposed returns in their constituencies, but he found the local Liberals reluctant to co-operate. Campbell-Bannerman, always sensitive to rank-and-file opinion, did not push him as far in this direction as some of the Liberal Imperialists would like to have gone.
1 Despite the fact that he might have been considered a portmanteau representative of all the categories which Margot Asquith thought most susceptible to the tariff reform bug. He was “ moderately educated ” even if not “semi-clever,” and he was nearer to being at once an imperialist, a duke, a journalist, and a member of the fighting forces than almost any other man in England (see p. 138 ti., supra).
Campbell-Bannerman’s position on this whole matter was delicate. The education issue apart, he himself was the biggest single obstacle to co-operation with the Unionist free-fooders. Some of them might have been prepared to eject Balfour in favour of a Devonshire or a Rosebery or even an Asquith Government, but certainly not for a Campbell-Bannerman one. “ Methods of barbarism ” was still too fresh in their minds for that. In addition, Bannerman’s speeches always stressed that the full radical programme was the only effective alternative to protection, and this too made co-operation more difficult. Lord James of Hereford (as the former Attorney-General had become) wrote to Asquith on December 21st, 1903, pointing out these obstacles.e
Campbell-Bannerman himself was perfectly aware that if the Liberal Party was seeking an “ opening to the right ” his leadership stood in the way. This did not mean that he overtly opposed such a development. Indeed we are told by J. A. Spender that “ he was foremost in plans for conciliating these people, and joined cheerfully in discussing the various ways of eliminating himself f. In any event he was rather doubtful towards the end of 1903 whether he could long continue as leader. His wife’s health, never good, had been so bad that autumn that they had been unable to pay their normal two months’ visit to Marienbad; and his own buoyancy had suffered greatly from this deprivation On October 29th Herbert Gladstone had written an important letter to Asquith from Hawarden:
Possibly you may already possess this information. In any case I think it right to make sure that you know it. When I saw C-B. at Belmont we had a long talk about the future. He told me that so far as he was concerned in the event of a change of government he did not think that he would be able to take any part which involved heavy and responsible work. A peerage and some office of dignity like the Presidentship (sic) of the Council would be what he would like.g'
This letter should be remembered when considering the attitude towards the future premiership taken by the Liberal Imperialists during this and subsequent years.
Doubts about his own physical capacity for the leadership did not pre-dispose Campbell-Bannerman in favour of those who were in effect saying that they would not co-operate with the Liberal Party so long as he was in command. He wrote to Asquith on December 26th in distinctly cool terms about the Unionist Free Traders: “James says the most of them would support the Gov. on any amendment to the address. Will our people in the country think this ‘ good enough ’ to withdraw candidates in favour of these gentry? ... We are ‘ the man on horseback ’; and while everything should be done to make things easy for them, it is they who must draw closer to us, however distasteful.”h Asquith did not dissent from this view. “ I quite agree with what you say about our relations with the Free-fooders,” he replied on December 28th. “ They look very well in the shop window, but I fear that in most constituencies their voting strength is negligible.i
During 1904 and 1905 Campbell-Bannerman’s enthusiasm for the premiership revived somewhat; and with this revival the issue of cooperation with the dissident Unionists might easily have become the cause of fresh dispute between him and Asquith. Fortunately, growing disillusionment with the determination of the dissidents combined with the strength which the Liberal Party had begun to show at by-elections to avoid this. For a few months after Chamberlain’s resignation there were fears that his initiative was improving the popularity of the Government. All the new ministers who had to seek re-election were returned without difficulty, and the Liberals even lost a seat at Rochester. But by the summer of 1904 and on through 1905 the picture was quite different. There hardly seemed to be a safe Conservative seat left in the country; and the need of the Liberal Party for allies declined accordingly.
For the Liberal Imperialists this new confidence did not settle the question of the leadership. Their concern for Campbell-Bannerman’s health remained at least as great as his own; and Haldane and Grey often did not even bother to operate behind this cloak.
One of Asquith’s reactions to Chamberlain’s new policy was to attempt to use it as a lever to get Rosebery back into active politics. In July, 1903, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to join a free trade committee, and in December he asked him to attend a political dinner, with the same result. Early in the autumn, however, Haldane and Grey, at Dalmeny, persuaded him to be a little more forthcoming, although hardly in the direction of Liberal unity. Haldane, writing from the New Club in Edinburgh, sent Asquith an excited account of this interview on October 5th:
(1) R.(osebery) has embodied in a secret memorandum1 his reasons why he will not form a Govt....
(2) R. will not enter a S(pencer) ministry. He expressed the utmost contempt for S.
(3) R. reiterates that he is going to work with all his strength for an A(squith) ministry. He admits that he has been too remiss, and has telegraphed to arrange 3 more meetings—in
London (East End), Leicester and Edinburgh. He finally admitted that a Spencer compromise might be necessary to get C-B from the House of Commons. Grey and I said that we would not serve under C-B either as P.M. or as leader in the H. of C.
This is what passed, and it was very definite. I left it to Grey and he was like a rock. You must lead us accordingly.j
1 This was dated September 30th and is published in full in Crewe’s Rosebery (11, pp. 585-87). It shows Rosebery at his most self-pitying. He complained that he had only a few real followers. He suffered from the grave disadvantage of not being in the House of Commons. His memory, his hearing and his powers of application were fading. He had fallen into a solitary habit of life which he could not easily break, and he was sure that a return to office would mean a return of sleeplessness.