91.The Manchester school had little to show on the score of peace – with the partial exception of America and France, where more liberal commerce had led to better relations. ‘The Change in Radicalism’, 1 March 1884.
92.Ruth Dudley Edwards wrote of Asquith, astonishingly, that ‘the civil liberties issue concerned him deeply’, and he supported ‘renewal of the Coercion Act only as a regrettable temporary expedient’ and ‘sought and examined alternatives’. Edwards, Pursuit of Reason, pp. 349–51. Asquith wrote that coercion ‘should be made vastly more stringent’: ‘Irish Protection Bill’, 29 January 1881; ‘Chamberlain on the Irish Agitation’, 31 December 1881; ‘Substitutes for Coercion’, 8 April 1882.
93.‘The Irish tenant farmer is not the victim of injustice or wrongdoing’ and the law was more favourable to him than in England, Scotland or France. ‘It is sometimes argued that the present generation of Irish landlords may fairly be made to suffer for the sins, real or supposed, of some former generation of Irish landlords – that, in fact, the landlords of today may be robbed, if it is found convenient, because the Irish tenants, say, of Cromwell’s day, were robbed.’ No English government would ever act on this principle. ‘If the possession of land for two centuries, and its peaceful descent from father to son, or from vendor to purchaser, does not confer an indispensable title, there can be no such thing to be had.’ ‘Notes on the Irish Land Question’, 19 March 1881. The Land League’s proposal to induce ‘a run on the Bank of Ireland’, a rush to exchange currency for gold at the ‘enemies’ bank’, was based on a similarly irrelevant argument that ‘the £3,000,000 capital of the bank was “borrowed” – i.e. taken by the British government during the war with the French Republic.’ ‘Bank of Ireland and the Land League’, 22 October 1881.
94.‘More Notes on the Irish Land Question’, 26 March 1881.
95.A complex society, the Economist wrote after the Mitchelstown Massacre – when police fired on a public meeting of Irish nationalists – ‘must be controlled by laws; and if laws are to exist, those who break them, whether by non-payment of debt, or by meeting in defiance of them, or by inciting to crime, must be reduced to obedience by suffering pain. Debts must be collected, even if defaulting debtors thereby lose their homes, as in England all bankrupts do. Seditious meetings, when formidable, must be dispersed, even if it is needful to use soldiers, or to take the lives endangered by a volley on a mob.’ ‘The New Liberal Lever’, 1 October 1887.
96.As the Spectator’s editor and proprietor after 1898, Strachey later broke with the Unionists too, over Tariff Reform, which might be acceptable for ‘national security’ reasons, but never on economic grounds. John St Loe Strachey, Adventure of Living, pp. 9–10, 179, 298–99, 307–8.
97.‘If, under such circumstances, it is inconsistent with the principles of Liberalism to resort to force, there is, as Mr Chamberlain points out, no escape from the conclusion that “Liberalism cannot defend the freedom which it is its object to establish, and is powerless to protect the majority against the anarchy and disorder which are fostered by an irreconcilable minority.” ’ ‘Mr Chamberlain on the Irish Agitation’, 31 December 1881.
98.H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists: Ideas and Politics of a Post-Gladstonian Elite, Oxford 1973, p. 143.
4. Landslide Liberalism
1.Or 145 seats. H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics 1892–1914, Cambridge 1973, p. 85.
2.In 1905 Campbell-Bannerman held off Herbert Henry Asquith, Richard Haldane and Edward Grey – the Liberal Imperialist triumvirate led by the erratic Earl of Rosebery, the ex-premier who argued that Liberals needed to be as militantly patriotic in foreign and colonial policy as Conservatives. Their ‘Relugas Compact’ tried to force Campbell-Bannerman into the Lords. H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists, pp. 110–19; Peter Rowland, The Last Liberal Governments 1905–1910, New York, 1968, pp. 9–18.
3.Sugar, coal and corn duties, reintroduced to help finance the Second Boer War, were also unpopular. Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England 1846–1946, Oxford 1997, pp. 225–26.
4.Balfour and his ‘little piggers’ went halfway, endorsing retaliatory tariffs. The scenes Bagehot had recalled from the 1840s, when ‘excited masses of men and women hung on the words of one talking political economy’, had returned, but under conditions in which Britain’s industrial lead looked less secure. Bagehot, ‘Mr Cobden’, CW, Vol. III, pp.223–24.
5.A. K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906, Newton Abbott 1973, pp. 69, 107–8, 160–64.
6.The ‘franchise represented a theory of property rather than individual rights’ – extending from ‘fancy borough’ to ‘broader household, occupation, and lodger franchises’. Multi-occupant homes and rooms, lodgers, recent removals, most soldiers, sailors, and seamen, and all poor relief recipients were excluded. Until 1918, the top 11 per cent had far greater ‘voting power’ than the bottom 89 per cent. Ibid., pp. 15–21. Russell estimates workers already made up two-thirds of the electorate; around 60 per cent is more likely according to H. C. G. Matthew, R. I. McKibbin and J. A. Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, October 1976, pp. 733–35.
7.The LRC had a £100,000 election fund. F. Bealey and H. Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906, London 1958, pp. 143–46, 158. The result was a breakthrough: 53 Labour MPs (29 under the LRC, 24 allied to Liberals) compared to 2 in 1900. Russell, Liberal Landslide, pp. 70–74.
8.Especially after the army’s performance in the Boer War seemed to reveal the enfeebled state of British soldiers. Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, London 1960, passim.
9.Chamberlain played this role before and after 1886, famously speaking of the ‘ransom’ property should pay for the ‘security’ the state afforded it. For his part in tariff reform, see Julian Amery, Joseph Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform Campaign, London 1969, pp. v–vi; E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914, London 1995, pp. 242–53.
10.The state’s moral purpose was set in a familiar frame: the ‘removal of obstacles’ to individual fulfilment – as in compulsory education. T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, eds. Paul Harris and John Morrow, Cambridge 1986, p. 161; Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience, T. H. Green and His Age, Cambridge 1964, p. 341. For the importance of Hegel – even if, after A. J. P. Taylor, of an ‘oddly transposed variety’ – to the ‘Liberal Idealists’, see Jeanne Morefield, Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire, Princeton 2004, pp. 8, 25.
11.Mill also backed a land tax, another idea central to New Liberals, but with an older pedigree, found in Ricardo and Malthus, and Cobden’s demand for free trade in land. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform, Oxford 1979, pp. 12–18, 43, 55–58; Bruce K. Murray, The People’s Budget 1909/10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics, Oxford 1980, pp. 34, 95–97; Stefan Collini, Liberalism and sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and political argument in England, 1880–1914, Cambridge 1979, pp. 171–84; Sandra Den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought, Oxford 1996, p 89, 108–11 and passim.
12.Francis W. Hirst, In the Golden Days, London 1947, pp. 111–13.
13.Ibid., pp. 113, 131–32.
14.Edgeworth, an ethicist turned economist who learned his craft from Jevons, could be practical too – going over ‘the whole ground of the science’ from Mill’s Political Economy, introducing Hirst to Marshall on currency, and to statistical analysis. An essay Hirst wrote on monopolies under his influence won the Cobden Prize in 1899. Ibid., pp. 133–36. For his classical learning, which inspired ‘an Aristophanic skit on Oscar Wilde’, see L. C. M. S. Amery, F. W. Hirst, H. A. A. Cruso, Aristophanes at Oxford, Oxford 1894; Hirst, Golden Days, p. 147.
15.Hilaire Belloc in Essays in Liberalism, London 1897, pp. 3–4, 19–20, 25, 155.
16.Worke
rs had benefited most. ‘Wages, like incomes, have doubled in real value in thirty-six years.’ Essays, pp. 53, 59, 62.
17.He condoned regulation or control of natural (as opposed to artificial) monopolies – ‘coinage, sanitation, water, gas, tramways’ – as exceptions that proved the rule, applying only where competition ‘is difficult or impossible’. A graduated income tax was an ‘encouragement rather than a menace to private property’, a ‘check on huge swellings of wealth’. But there were limits. Raising taxes too high could lead to capital flight, or, ‘more loathsome’, a ‘corrupt desire among the poorer part of the electorate for increased expenditure’. Hirst felt, at this stage, that old-age pensions were such a ‘bribe’. Ibid., pp. 69, 82–83, 89,
18.Asquith did not find himself in ‘substantial disagreement’, however. Hirst, Golden Days, p. 157; Essays, x.
19.For the debate, and the reaction of Chronicle editor H. W. Massingham, see, Freeden, New Liberalism, pp. 62–64.
20.S. Ball, ‘Socialism and Individualism: A Challenge and an Eirenicon’, Economic Review, October 1897, pp. 490–520. In a subsequent exchange, Ball was ‘surprised’ to see Hirst invoke economic man ‘in all his naked and primitive simplicity’ – ‘not even brought up to the date of Marshall’, who at least conceded the growing importance of ‘motives to collective action’ within capitalist industry itself. See, ‘Individualism and Socialism I, II’, Economic Review, April 1898, pp. 225–35.
21.They won the backing of the Speaker’s owner, Liberal MP and chemical baron Sir John Brunner, and that of Sir William McEwan, owner of the Edinburgh Evening News. The Speaker had originally been founded to compete with the Spectator, run by Hutton and Townsend, after that paper defected from the Liberals over Irish Home Rule in 1886.
22.On ‘foreign and home politics’, Hirst observed of Hobhouse and himself, ‘both of us have moved, but he, I think, the most’. Hirst, Golden Days, pp. 174, 193, 205, 214. Hirst records that Ball, his socialist critic, left the Fabians over their racial and economic justifications of the war: ‘in a sense this is more of a truth because it is incorrect.’ Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, Cambridge 1978, p. 77.
23.D. A. Hamer, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics, Oxford 1968, p. 333. For Hammond, Hobhouse, Hirst, Hobson and others on the Speaker, see Towards a Social Policy: Or Suggestions for Constructive Reform, ed. J. L. Hammond, London 1905.
24.P. J. Cain, Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance 1887–1938, Oxford 2002, p. 96; Francis W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray, and J. L. Hammond, Liberalism and Empire, London 1900, p. 54; Hirst, Golden Days, p. 185; J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, London 1900.
25.The ‘barren and intoxicating splendour’ of the Sudan conquest was a precedent. Murray wrote on ‘the exploitation of inferior races’ in ancient and modern empires; Hammond on nationality and morality as the hallmarks of liberal statesmanship, which had made England the ‘guardian of European civilization’: Liberalism and Empire, xvi.
26.Ibid., p. 72
27.Ibid., pp. 63, 75.
28.Ibid., p. 114.
29.Hobson and Hirst made taxation of land values central to combatting imperialism, but Hobson added a theoretical bent with the ‘unearned increment’. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, London 1902, pp. 54, 64. Hirst also used a root metaphor. ‘What is this giant upas tree that has to be cut down?’ Liberalism and Empire, p. 4.
30.A ‘great future awaits that portion of the Liberal Party’ which repudiated the ‘wasteful excesses of aggressive imperialism’ and conscription, while maintaining ‘the superiority of our fleet at the proportions fixed by tradition and reason’. Not only was this a winning electoral strategy in Britain, it was also the first step to reducing imperial rivalries ‘for it is our expenditure which forces the pace … upon a reluctant Czar, a recalcitrant Reichstag, and an unwilling Chamber of Deputies’. Ibid., 32, 113–14. ‘We wish we could discover a single reason for prefixing the epithet Liberal to the new type of Imperialism.’ Hirst, ‘Pitt the Youngest’, Speaker, 4 November 1899.
31.The Arbiter in Council, London, 1906, pp. 350, 507. Reid asked Hirst to write a blue book on reforming maritime law for Cabinet circulation, hoping to convince Grey to back it at the Foreign Office, and the Hague. ‘But Grey and the Admiralty were obdurate, holding that as we were the greatest naval power we ought not to abandon for the sake of protecting our own commerce the right as belligerents of destroying the enemy’s and cutting off all his imports’: Golden Days, pp. 238–40. See also Francis Hirst, Commerce and Property in Naval Warfare, London 1906, and the indignant exchange in the Times, ‘Private Property at Sea’, 11 November 1913.
32.Hirst, Golden Days, pp. 136, 228–29; F. W. Hirst by His Friends, pp. 63–73. Hirst and Hoover seem to have met in the context of Hirst’s agitation for a negotiated peace in 1915, when Hoover was leading relief efforts in Belgium, and the two discovered they shared their enthusiasm for classical liberalism. An ailing Hirst visited Hoover just before the stock market crash in October 1929, and was examined by the White House doctor. ‘Medical Notes of Dr. J. T. Boone’, 17 December 1929. Hirst Papers, BLOU, Box 13.
33.Hirst met the statistician and former assistant editor at the club. Centennial Volume, p. 71.
34.Cain, Hobson and Imperialism, p. 97; as ‘non-interventionist’, see Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, p. 78; a ‘committed pacifist’ with a ‘completely closed mind’, Edwards, Pursuit of Reason, pp. 398, 465, 525.
35.‘Pitt the Youngest’, Speaker, 4 November 1899; Liberalism and Empire, pp. xv, xvii. ‘I have never been able to agree with the Quakers’, he reflected. A ‘clearly aggressive attack on one nation by another – e.g. that of Soviet Russia on Finland, or of Germany on Holland – should be resisted unless resistance is hopeless’. Hirst, Golden Days, pp. 233, 256, 258.
36.Party leaders were praised for learning to work for ‘relative adaptations’. ‘Eclipse of Socialism’, 16 March 1907.
37.Edwards, Pursuit of Reason, pp. 495–97, 498. Like Walter Layton, Reid was Cambridge-educated; he left the paper over its anti-war stance, returning after as assistant editor. In 1932, he joined the Daily Telegraph as City Editor. Accountant, 5 November 1938; Spectator, 28 October 1938.
38.‘Laissez-faire, for him, is a religion; his door-mat at home carried instead of the conventional “Welcome”, the words “Peace, Free Trade and Goodwill.” ’ Hamilton had points in common with Hirst. She was sympathetic to Germany, studying in Kiel before attending Newnham College at Cambridge. There, she read classics and economics, influenced by G. Lowes Dickenson and Alfred Marshall, and honed her debating skills in defence of free trade and opposition to the Boer War. Ibid., pp. 41, 80.
39.See the recollection of labour historian and Wadham alumnus, A. F. Thompson, in Hirst by His Friends, p. 37.
40.‘Enmity of Germany to Great Britain’, 5 December 1896; ‘Latest Manifesto of the German Emperor’, 28 April 1900; ‘The Powers and Morocco’, 10 June 1905; ‘The Conciliatory Chancellor’, 7 October 1905; ‘Armaments’, 28 July 1906.
41.‘The Prime Minister’s Character and Policy’, 12 October 1907. His personality traits in another idiom: ‘an elderly and rich Presbyterian whose three passions in life were his wife, the French nation and his collection of walking sticks.’ George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, New York 1935, p. 29.
42.Asquith had brilliantly undermined Tariff Reformers, who wanted to tax items such as sugar to pay for pensions. ‘A Great Budget’, 9 May 1908. The Daily Mail called Hirst’s article ‘exalted nonsense’. He replied: ‘They certainly showed no solicitude for the taxpayer or the debt in the years preceding the Boer War, or during the Boer War, or after the Boer War’. ‘Second Thoughts on the Budget and the National Debt’, 16 May 1908.
43.Rowland, Last Liberal Governments, pp. 143, 150–53.
44.A ‘super tax’ on incomes of £3,000 to £5,000, rising from 1s to 1s. 2d, could ‘hardly be called
unreasonable’. Higher rates had prevailed during the Napoleonic, Crimean and Boer Wars. ‘The Budget’, 1 May 1909.
45.The estimated cost of health insurance when fully operational in 1915 was £24,500,000: £11,000,000 would come from workers, £9,000,000 from employers, the remainder from the state. ‘National Insurance Scheme’, 6 May 1911.
46.Lloyd George’s was ‘the most successful Budget from the revenue producing point of view which the financial historian of this, or, perhaps, any other, country can recall in times of peace’. ‘Budget of 1911’, 20 May 1911.
47.‘Rejection of the Budget’, December 4 1909.
48.Links between the City and Liberals had frayed since the Unionist split under Gladstone in the 1880s. David Kynaston, The City of London: Golden Years 1890–1914, London 1995, Vol II, pp. 494–502. For ‘Bankers’ Clearing House’ petition, see ‘Bankers and the Budget’, 15 May 1909.
49.R. H. I. Palgrave, ‘The Influence of the Taxation of Capital upon the Welfare of a Country’, Bankers’ Magazine, December 1909, 728–30.
50.‘Free Trade in Being’, 13 March 1909.
51.‘The Word Socialism’, 9 October 1909. ‘Our own extraordinary record of the new capital raised in London during the last six months’ showed that ‘if the rich can save at such a rate … even a super-tax and highly graduated death duties are hardly felt in times of peace and prosperity.’ ‘The Budget’, 2 July 1910. City aversion to reform was magnified by the People’s Budget, but predated it. ‘We have no doubt that the introduction of old-age pensions for the poor will be regarded with a good deal of disfavour in the City, which is apprehensive just now about anything that may be thought socialistic.’ ‘A Great Budget’, 9 May 1908.
52.Avner Offer, ‘Empire and Social Reform: British Overseas Investment and Social Reform, 1908–1914’, Historical Journal, March 1983, pp. 123, 131. See their joint report on national credit, foreign lending and trade to the US Senate Monetary Commission – set up after the 1907 crash, in part to study European financial centres, leading to the Federal Reserve Act in 1913: Francis Hirst and George F. Paish, ‘The Credit of Nations’ and ‘The Trade Balance of the US’, Washington 1910.
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