This eBook is licensed to Karim Mamdani, [email protected] on 12/02/2019
4
Landslide Liberalism
Social Reform and War
Of the three general election landslides to have transfigured twentieth-century British politics, the one in 1906 remains in many ways the most remarkable. The Liberal Party had tasted office for just three of the last nineteen years, while the rivalry within it between Imperialists – grouped around the Liberal League – and radicals – in the Liberal Federation – made improving on that record seem just as remote. Liberal disarray over the Second Boer War was such that, six years earlier, it had failed to contest almost a quarter of seats.1 Arthur Balfour, the Conservative prime minister, resigned in December 1905, hoping that strife would cripple his ‘pro-Boer’ opposite, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, leading Liberals to another electoral drubbing. Liberal Imperialists did try to displace Campbell-Bannerman, but failing in that promptly agreed to serve under him at the Foreign Office, the War Office, and the Treasury.2 Infighting was kept at bay, even over Irish Home Rule, where Liberals had learned to be vague.
Conservatives were partly responsible for this surprising display of unity. Voters showed signs of fatigue with them, especially after a series of unpopular measures, from education and licensing acts that enraged religious dissenters, to the arrival of 50,000 Chinese labourers in South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer War – a government scheme to cheaply man mines there, which inflamed working class opinion.3 It was the maverick politician Joseph Chamberlain, however, who gave the election shape and colour, turning it into a referendum on free trade. In his younger days a radical mayor of Birmingham, where he owned a screw factory, he later bolted from the Liberal Party over Ireland, and became a leading Liberal Unionist. By 1903, he put his Conservative allies on notice by resigning as colonial secretary to pitch his case for tariff reform directly to the British people – proposing import duties on food that gave preference to the colonies, with the aim of binding them more tightly to Britain, while shielding British industry from foreign rivals. Balfour resigned late in 1905 when it became clear that Chamberlain, who led the largest group of Unionist MPs, would withdraw his support unless the government went ‘whole hog’ for tariff reform.4
This was a Christmas gift to the Liberals, who rallied round the flag of free trade, associated with the heroic Anti-Corn Law struggles from which their party was forged. It was the Tories’ turn to fall apart: nine Unionists defected, including Winston Churchill, and ninety-seven seats went uncontested. In an election pitting songs of ‘Tariff Reform Means Work for All’ against cries that what it really entailed was a ‘dear loaf’, the latter won out. Here it was Herbert Henry Asquith, widely seen as the best orator on behalf of free trade, who led the charge – entirely appropriate from the former political editor of the Economist. Conservatives lost over half their seats on a swing of 10.6 per cent. Liberals made gains almost everywhere – even in formerly hostile parts of Lancashire and London – adding 224 more seats since the khaki election of 1900. They now enjoyed an outright majority of 130, and with their Irish Nationalist and Labour allies, this rose to 356 – the widest margin since 1832.5
Yet the 1906 landslide had its origins in more than a negative defence of free trade. Liberals took active steps to win their historic victory, as evidenced by the widespread expectation that it was about to usher in a new era of social reform. Even as the franchise in Britain remained deeply undemocratic up to 1918 – with four and a half million lower class men unable to vote, 500,000 or so plural votes to property owners in the boroughs and counties, and women excluded – after 1885–86, about half the electorate was working-class.6 By the turn of the century, the growing trade union movement was attempting to organize the working class as an independent political force – a development Liberals vigilantly watched and tried to head off. In 1903 the party signed a secret agreement with the Labour Representation Committee, freeing the latter to fight in 30–40 races unopposed in exchange for its campaign war chest and urban support. Labour expected reform as part of this bargain: two-thirds of Liberal candidates called for restoring legal immunity to trade unions (overturned in the 1901 Taff Vale case), creating old age pensions and more.7 Internally, these welfare commitments bound the Imperialists and the radicals together, even if the former put the accent on ‘efficiency’ and breeding up a strong imperial race.8 Chamberlain was also after working-class support, pressuring Liberals from the right. In addition to mitigating unemployment, he argued, tariffs would generate cash to spend on social programs – a problem Liberals would have to face without touching free trade.9
The efforts of a generation of Liberal intellectuals to address this issue – of whether (and if so, how) the state should take steps to raise moral and material living standards, leaving behind laissez-faire – is the final element in understanding 1906. Philosopher T. H. Green often gets credit for introducing Hegel and thus a version of continental idealism to Oxford in the 1880s – with the aim of breaking the individualist mould of liberalism, or at least reconciling it to an ethics of communal obligation and legitimate state action.10 Scholars have, more recently, questioned if Germans are necessary to explain this drift in thought. New Liberals had plenty of native sources upon which to build their plans for reform: from Bentham, an interest in human happiness and in the state’s legislative power to increase it; and from Mill, a notion of equality of sacrifice in taxation that lent itself to proportional and distributional schemes. Even Darwin and Spencer were sources, after whom New Liberals fashioned evolutionary models for societal – not just individual – development, believing this could be consciously directed towards cooperative ends.11
Contact with the labour movement played no part in the generation of these ideas. They arose in the cloistered setting of Oxford and aimed to pre-empt attacks on private property, viewed as an extension of human personality, not to abolish it. As a result, in 1906 Liberals claimed the most dynamic set of ‘organic’ intellectuals of any political grouping in Britain – students of Green, Toynbee, Ruskin and others, prominent among them J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse, who had graduated to a national stage as journalists, academics, and politicians. Francis Hirst, the new editor of the Economist, was one of these. Though less known than Hobson and Hobhouse, two friends and colleagues, Hirst was integral to the makeup of New Liberalism, from the context that shaped it, to the tensions that beset it after 1906, to the disaster of war that broke it in 1914. At the Economist, Hirst plunged into the battles that defined Liberalism in office, as the crucial link to a City of London divided by all that was ‘New’ in it.
Hirst and the Golden Days of Liberalism
The third of five children from a nonconformist family with a wool-stapling business in West Yorkshire, Hirst had a familiar profile. His divergence from the path of past editors, in the matter of education, became the rule for future editors: in 1892, after Clifton College, he was sent up to Oxford. A dissenting father and doctrinal tests had closed this route to Bagehot. Yet it was the great man himself whom Hirst otherwise resembled. As an undergraduate at Wadham he was as uninterested in captaining the boats as he was in the cricket eleven, Rugby fifteen or Association eleven. ‘Not one of those distinctions pointed the way to leadership in Church or State.’ The portraits in the hall of the Oxford Union, in contrast, showed the heights to which its officers could aspire. Hirst became president, enlivening debates that blended seriousness – ‘that this House heartily welcomes Mr. Gladstone’s intervention in the Armenian agitation’ or ‘the time has come for the substitution of arbitration for war’ – with what passed for humour – ‘that ladies should propose’.12 Tall and broad, Hirst dressed well for literary society dinners, in a light-blue waistcoat with gilt buttons, and joined the Russell Club, known as a gathering spot for advanced Liberals.
The Union was his centre of gravity, serving up exalted references and role models. Gladstone, a ‘majestic presence’ with a ‘deep and
still musical voice’, returned to cheers in 1892, with a beguiled Hirst on hand to observe that sixty-two years had elapsed since the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ stint as president. Four years later, Hirst was puffing on cigars with Asquith, then Home Secretary, who had just led a debate on voluntary schools. Chamberlain, on a similar occasion, invited Hirst to lunch and a tour of his orchid houses. At ‘Teddy’ Hall he ran into Ramsay MacDonald, a ‘handsome young fellow with curly black hair and bright black eyes’, a ‘wild man’, who was priming ‘dare-devil undergraduates with dangerous thoughts’.13 By the time he left Oxford in 1896, Hirst had demonstrated a rare mix of intellectual qualities – earning a double first in classics, while excelling in the subtleties of ‘abstract economics’ under F. Y. Edgeworth.14
Hirst’s classmates were just as central to his political development, and at this stage they held to a very traditional view of the liberal creed, proudly at odds with many in their cohort who wished to overhaul its philosophic and economic foundations. In 1897 Hirst, then a teacher ‘bubbling over with zeal’ at the London School of Economics, was the organizing force behind Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men – a rallying cry for the Liberal Party to return to first principles after its latest electoral rout in 1895. ‘Is it possible to revert at this hour to the simple doctrines which formed the strength of our first leaders? Most undoubtedly it is.’ Hilaire Belloc wrote on the Liberal Party’s free trade ideals, which must be pressed against both the ‘economic absolutism of the landlord’ entrenched in the House of Lords, as well as the socialists, who would ‘dissolve thrift, and self-control, and the personal honour which keeps a contract sacred’.15 J. A. Simon, J. S. Phillimore, J. L. Hammond and P. J. Macdonell laid down the line on labour, foreign policy, and education – while Hirst, in the longest, most polemical piece, dismissed as faddish all attempts to alter the core doctrine (whether Social Democratic, Primrose League imperialist, or Social Evolutionist). Liberals, acting in the names of Bright, Cobden, Mill and Gladstone, were the only real reformers, with an outstanding record of fifty years of ‘uninterrupted progress’ since repeal of the Corn Laws.16 Any intervening changes to liberalism had, notwithstanding appearances, left it unaltered: Factory Acts, Death Duties, the right of workers to combine in trade unions, free and compulsory education, even a graduated income tax – in each case, Liberals had justified state action only to ‘prevent men, women, or children from suffering in their capacity of wealth producers’.17
Hirst conceived this early book as a provocation to new social varieties of liberalism, and tried to secure a preface from an ‘eminent Liberal’ to amplify it. While Morley and Asquith politely declined – the latter citing its ‘declaration of war’ on party members who had ‘gravitated towards’ collectivism – Gladstone agreed to bless the ‘efforts on behalf of individual freedom and independence’ of these six Oxford men.18 Essays in Liberalism made an impact, even as it elicited mainly critical reactions from the Liberal press. If the Speaker found it ‘refreshing’, the Daily News and Daily Chronicle objected to its ‘narrow’ liberalism and caricature of socialism.19 Sidney Ball, the least ‘woolly’ leftist at Oxford, according to Hirst, replied for the Fabians – arguing that socialism was the realization of liberal individualism, not its antithesis, under new economic conditions, and for the many, not just the few.20 Essays in Liberalism put Hirst and his friends at the centre of debates in the party and press over New Liberalism, with a clear position on just how little it ought to depart from the old.
Morley was delighted with the book, which bore a dedication to him, and in 1898 asked Hirst to assist him in his latest literary endeavour – a biography of the recently departed Gladstone. The sifting of thousands of old letters served as an unlikely turning point for Hirst: not just ‘the best time he ever had’ with the living ‘embodiment of philosophic Liberalism’, but an eye-opening experience, because it took place amidst the Second Boer War. Hirst fervently opposed this conflict – as much on Cobdenite grounds of peace and economy as in a Gladstonian defence of small nationalities – at meetings for the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism, and in the Speaker, which he and J. L. Hammond took over in 1899.21 Hirst changed in important ways a result of his anti-war activities. As the Imperialists in the Liberal Party lined up behind government diplomacy in South Africa, with Lord Rosebery leading Haldane, Grey and Asquith to endorse annexation of the Boer Republics, the collectivists Hirst had derided two years earlier in Essays in Liberalism became his political allies and friends.
Pro-Boer Liberalism
Hirst now asked Leonard Hobhouse, with whom he had felt ‘rather far apart in politics’ at Oxford, to extend his Manchester Guardian work for the Speaker, remarking that he ‘thinks very differently now of Cobden and Bright’. H. W. Massingham, a harsh critic of Essays in Liberalism, became a friend, as a lead writer for the Daily News (and later at the Nation, which Hirst helped to set up with money from the Quaker sweets manufacturers the Rowntrees).22 In the League, Hirst came to share platforms as well as columns with the political economist J. A. Hobson; and this widened his political orbit beyond Morley – whose ‘sore throat’ during the war frustrated his followers – to include a ‘rather daring’ Lloyd George, and the unexpectedly inspiring ‘pro-Boer’ Campbell-Bannerman.23
The war not only brought young Cobdenites and collectivists closer together in a battle to control the party: it forced them to explain what had caused it. That urgency was palpable in Liberalism and Empire (1900), where the internationally-minded Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray joined Hirst and Hammond in condemning military aggression as a betrayal of the liberal tradition in foreign affairs. Hirst’s contribution, ‘Financial Imperialism’, owed much to Hobson, whose War in South Africa appeared earlier that year, as well as to the satirical broadsides of Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.24 Attacks on the Transvaal and Orange Free State were only the latest ‘unjust and uncalled for wars’ Britain had fought, stirred by the basest instincts of ‘adventure, conquest, mastery, and race-pride’ and ‘strangely wedded with speculative finance’.25 The scramble to partition Africa in the decades leading up to the Second Boer War had no other basis, Hirst argued, and was especially misguided on commercial grounds. British trade with foreign nations was worth three times as much as the Empire. ‘Trade follows the flag’, he wrote, mocking a standard imperialist trope, ‘over jungles, swamps, deserts’ and even ‘flies after it in the face of facts, arguments and arithmetic’.26
Hirst conceded that a small group of capitalists did stand to gain from such policies: arms-makers, spoiled sons (of free-trading fathers) who had become ‘sleeping partners in limited companies and supporters of Mr Chamberlain’, and ‘international financiers’.27 They had the political clout, moreover, to see their interests enacted. The most pernicious specimen of this group was Cecil Rhodes, who had parlayed a few diamond mines in Kimberley into the mighty De Beers monopoly, buying up not only the press and political machinery of the Cape Colony – but also of Britain, where bribes had secured him a royal charter, a seat on the Privy Council, honours from Oxford, and apparent immunity for his crimes, including the 1895 Jameson Raid, a botched first attempt to force Britain to annex the Transvaal. This time, Rhodes and his largest investors had set the whole Empire in motion in order to snatch the Transvaal’s mines, and bring in the men to work them. ‘Democratic as it may appear on paper’, wrote Hirst, in a distorted echo of Bagehot, ‘the British Constitution is very little better than a pretence. It is only a mask over the face of plutocracy’.28
Hobson may have developed the more sophisticated critique of finance capital, and the unequal distribution of wealth feeding it, as the ‘taproot’ of imperialism. But Hirst gave this theory his own accent, and imparted it to the Economist.29 In his essay from Liberalism and Empire, imperialism emerged as the single greatest danger to Liberalism, both old and new. The need to pay off huge debts after the war would, he predicted, serve as an excuse for the Conservatives to scrap free trade, raising t
ariffs and other taxes, at the same time as ever-higher spending on the navy and army took precedence over productive investments in education and health. ‘Radical change’ was now the only alternative to this scenario: writers should share in the ownership, and control the policy, of their papers; election expenses and salaries must be paid; and a graduated income tax was no longer just about fairness, but ‘self-defence’, reducing the political reach of wealth along with its concentration. The Second Boer War fuelled Hirst’s attack on imperialism in and outside the party, marking his conversion to an advanced brand of New Liberalism.30
Four years after the end of the Boer war, the Liberals took power in a landslide, with Hirst among its most effective propagandists. In the interim, he wrote for the Speaker, the Nation, the Manchester Guardian, and as City editor for the short-lived Liberal daily, The Tribune. He also penned lively books updating the Cobdenite trinity of peace, retrenchment and reform for a new era in Free Trade and Other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School in 1902, Local Government in England (co-authored) in 1903, Adam Smith in 1904, Monopolies, Trusts, and Kartels in 1905. Arbiter in Council, written in 1906, was a Socratic dialogue on war from biblical times to the present. It made the case for international arbitration, and raised his profile with yet another strata of liberals: the legal scholar F. W. Maitland, the world’s richest man Andrew Carnegie and his Endowment for International Peace, and Sir Robert Reid, future Lord Chancellor, with whom Hirst worked on proposals to revise maritime law (for the free passage of merchant ships in wartime) at the second Hague Conference in 1907.31 Amidst all this he married Helena Cobden, Richard’s great-niece, in 1903 – and travelled widely. In Italy, he befriended Luigi Einaudi, the economist, journalist and future president, whom he would recruit to the Economist; in Austria, Josef Redlich, the law professor, Liberal politician and finance minister, who also became a correspondent for it; and eventually eminent Americans, including Herbert Hoover, with whom Hirst struck up a lifelong friendship.32 Hirst stepped still closer to the centre of this liberal universe when Sir Robert Giffen, a fellow member of the Political Economy Club, advised Eliza Bagehot to make him the next editor of the Economist in 1907.33
Liberalism at Large Page 17