UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 BROWSING ROOM 
 
 GIFT OF
 
 PILLARS OF THE STATE
 
 LORD GREY. 
 
 [Cecil
 
 PILLARS OF 
 THE STATE 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT SIDEBOTHAM 
 ("A Student of Politics") 
 
 Xonfcon 
 NISBET & CO. LTD. 
 
 22 BERNERS STREET, W.I
 
 First published in 1921 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by Haull, Wation & Viney, Ld., 
 London and AyUsbury.
 
 DA 
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 MOST of the essays in this volume 
 have appeared serially in the 
 columns of The Times, whose 
 proprietors the author takes this opportunity 
 of thanking for their permission to republish. 
 Some additions have been made, but only to 
 bridge the gulf between their first appearance 
 and their present publication. 
 
 The essays on Mr. Lloyd George, on Lady 
 As tor and Captain Elliot, and the introductory 
 and final chapters, are now published for the 
 first time. 
 
 I have to thank my friend, Mr. James Heddle, 
 of Sir Edward Hulton's publications, for loans 
 of photographs and for help in choosing them. 
 
 182321
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGIB 
 
 INTRODUCTORY : THE PRESS GALLERY FORE 
 
 AND Air 11 
 
 I. LORD GREY 33 
 
 II. THE CECILIANS ..... 45 
 
 III. SIR ROBERT HORNE .... 57 
 
 IV. LORD READING 69 
 
 V. MR. LLOYD GEORGE .... 79 
 
 VI. LORD CURZON ..... 103 
 
 VII. MR. ASQUITH 115 
 
 VIII. MR. BONAR LAW .... 127 
 
 IX. MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL . . .141 
 X. MR. CHAMBERLAIN . . . .153 
 
 XI. SIR GORDON HEWART . . . 165 
 XII. LADY ASTOR 175 
 
 XIII. MR. J. H. THOMAS . . . .187 
 
 XIV. LORD BIRKENHEAD . . . .195 
 XV. LORD DERBY .... 205
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 PAQH 
 
 XVI. MR. BRACE AND OTHERS . . . 215 
 
 XVII. LORD CARSON 225 
 
 XVIII. CAPTAIN ELLIOT .... 235 
 
 POSTSCRIPT : THE FUTURE OF PARLIAMENTARY 
 
 GOVERNMENT . .... 245
 
 THE PRESS 
 GALLERY
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 
 
 THE author was for some eighteen months 
 a representative of The Times in the 
 Press Galleries of the Houses of Par- 
 liament, and the studies that follow are based 
 mainly on observation from these high latitudes, 
 and only in a few instances from personal 
 acquaintance with their subjects. It is a 
 strange life, that of the Press Gallery of the 
 House of Commons, especially to one entering 
 it after many years spent behind the purdah 
 of the leader-writer, and quite as interesting 
 as the life of the floor of the House or of the 
 Terrace. Distinguished strangers in their 
 gallery must often have noticed the row of men 
 in the gallery opposite behind the Speaker's 
 Chair, each in his little pew, and every one 
 more oddly intellectual in appearance than the 
 others. These are the Press Gallery journalists. 
 Some are seen to be taking copious notes, and 
 these are the reporters, pre-Raphaelite artists 
 whose business it is to set down exactly what 
 people say in the debate, improving its 
 
 11
 
 12 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 grammar, removing tautology, and making 
 sense where this is lacking. Others write very 
 little, but sit disdainfully observant, and 
 these are the impressionists, who are there 
 to make a study of the proceedings for in- 
 dolent readers, and are called " sketch- writers." 
 The reporters work in shifts of a quarter of an 
 hour at a time, and the distinguished stranger 
 opposite cannot have failed to notice the 
 new shift enter by one or other of the two 
 doors at the back of the gallery, each with 
 its liveried Cerberus, tap the old shift on 
 the shoulder, and take his place. People are 
 always coming and leaving, but the disdainful 
 impressionists go out oftener than they come 
 in, for their art is that of rejection. 
 
 Through the doors there are two anti- chambers 
 with telephone boxes, both leading into a room 
 full of black oak desks, with deep corner seats 
 covered with shiny leather in two corners, a 
 post-office in another corner, and doors every- 
 where. Here there is always a buzz of 
 voices comparing notes of the speeches, and 
 checking doubtful passages ; here, if a quota- 
 tion has been made from the Latin classics 
 (which happens about once a session), the 
 passer-by who has been to Oxford is asked 
 to verify and translate, and made to feel for a 
 brief moment that the money his father spent
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 13 
 
 on his education was after all not all waste. 
 There are other similar rooms on the same floor, 
 one of which is reserved to The Times, a 
 privilege jealously guarded and greatly envied. 
 Everywhere else the passer-by can overhear 
 resume's of the proceedings being shouted over 
 telephones to various newspapers ; there is the 
 scurry of newsagency boys carrying messages, 
 the shuffling of ancient retainers, and the litter 
 of copying blacks and other advanced journalis- 
 tic technique. Except through the one private 
 room of The Times there is a right of way 
 everywhere, and there is incessant going and 
 coming ; it is half street, half office. A dis- 
 dainful one fresh from tea will stop and ask 
 someone coming out, Who's up ? What 
 did he say ? Or, How did the House take 
 that ? And, being answered, as he always is, 
 civilly, will go back to more tea or forward 
 to more debate, according to his judgment. 
 There are two upstairs floors also belonging to 
 the Press Gallery, containing reading and 
 writing rooms, a dining-room, news-rooms, 
 a library, and three other rooms. One of 
 these is a tea-bar, famous because tea is the 
 drink of the intellectual, and because you go 
 through it to get to the House of Lords or 
 the Committee Rooms or the Lobbies. There 
 is another bar, where towards the end of the
 
 14 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 evening conversation is brilliant, or merely 
 ponderous, and political reputations are made 
 and unmade three times an hour. And there 
 is a room called, for some reason, the boudoir, 
 which is inhabited by people whose writing is 
 so bad that they, out of love for their fellow- 
 men, use typewriters. These unhappy but 
 mostly deserving men sit herded into a small 
 room far away from everyone, and when they 
 are all in the throes of composition, the noise 
 is like that of an Oldham spinning mill. The 
 theory is that while one who uses a pen must 
 be protected from the noise of a typewriter, 
 the people who use typewriters love each other's 
 noise. So hard is the way of the altruist. 
 
 In this strange world journalists are by 
 themselves, though a vagrant Member of 
 Parliament, if his manners are good, occasionally 
 penetrates. You find your way about it 
 by walking corkscrew fashion, turning as 
 often as possible to the left if you are going 
 upstairs, and to the right if you are coming 
 down. They are a very happy family, and 
 surely there is no place in the world where 
 there is so much jostling of helpful and 
 amiable understanding, for there is no room for 
 jealousy amongst men who do so much writing 
 that they have no time for reading, least of all 
 what their friends write. Some are paid by
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 15 
 
 quantity, and these by dint of hard work that 
 a nigger blackleg would scorn are alleged to 
 make large sums of money. Others never 
 seem to work at all, having acquired a wonder- 
 ful technique that enables them to turn out a 
 column while you turn your back. Others 
 unhappily bite the ends of their penholders, or 
 indulge in rallentandos and long pauses on 
 their typewriters in search of the just and 
 exact word. Everywhere is a high if some- 
 what cynical conscientiousness. No writing to 
 speak of is done in the House itself. To know 
 when to be in the House and when it is safe to 
 be out of it requires a strategic sense, which, if 
 they were generals, would win them an earl- 
 dom ; but occasionally there are " break- 
 throughs " of debate, which make pie of every- 
 thing that has been written earlier, and if this 
 takes place late at night you get scenes of 
 indescribable valour, and your languid im- 
 pressionist becomes a Brigadier- General Carey. 
 If only these men could write what they think 
 and say, what wonderful documents newspapers 
 would be. Alas, all newspapers well, nearly 
 all write down to the level of propaganda. 
 But there is no such blight, thank goodness, 
 on the opinions of newspaper men that are 
 not published. The pen is sworn, but the 
 mind remains unsworn, behind those swinging
 
 16 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 doors and up those crooked staircases. Every 
 night hundreds of little babies of political 
 thought are murdered because they are born 
 out of party wedlock, and may not come down 
 to a respectable family breakfast. 
 
 There is yet a third class of Parliamentary 
 journalists, known as the Lobby men. The 
 business of these people is to get political news, 
 and with this object they hang about the 
 Lobbies, waylaying Members as they emerge 
 from the House or just as often being waylaid 
 by them, seeking explanations from Ministers, 
 trying to take everyone's temperature, endur- 
 ing long and suffering all things, publicly 
 evaded, secretly courted. There is a high 
 standard of professional honour amongst these 
 men. The surest way to have a secret kept is 
 to impart it to them in confidence; the surest 
 way to have it published is to refuse confidence. 
 Every political sin will be forgiven by these 
 men but deception or attempted deception. 
 They wear for the most part a sad and anxious 
 look, and make an outward show of deep 
 suspicion towards each other's enterprise, but 
 in fact work in rings in which the information 
 obtained by any member is at the service of all 
 the other partners. Only one of these Lobby 
 men is known to be a Conservative, and the 
 job seems to dye everyone's mind to one of the
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 17 
 
 many shades of Liberalism. But, like the 
 gallery men, they have a wonderful knack of 
 separating their private and their ex-officio 
 opinions. Who shall paragraph the para- 
 graphists ? 
 
 But to return to the House. It fills up three 
 times a day. The first time is for questions, 
 which, from their miscellaneous character, 
 always yield topics of interest. These last 
 from a quarter to three to a quarter to four, 
 and are followed by questions of which private 
 notice has been given to a Minister. These 
 frequently relate to the more urgent political 
 matters of the hour, and Ministers who have a 
 definite statement that they wish to make 
 usually take this opportunity. Questions over, 
 you hear a voice crying in the Lobbies outside, 
 " Orders of the Day," but unless some new Bill 
 or other important question is coming on 
 immediately, the voice is the signal for Members 
 who are in to troop out, not for those who are 
 out to come in. A House of fifty or sixty is 
 not noticeably thin. If an important speaker 
 is up, Members will come in, for all the smoke- 
 rooms and reading-rooms have what is called 
 an indicator, giving the name of the speaker. 
 Three-fourths of the Members who vote in the 
 average division have not heard a word of the 
 debate, but in many cases the arguments used 
 2
 
 18 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 are only hotted up from the committee-room 
 debates, and everything that can be said for 
 or against is familiar. The hardest work of 
 Members (it may be here observed) is done in 
 committee upstairs, which means in one or 
 other of the rooms off the long corridor which 
 journalists reach by way of the tea-room. 
 By six the House fills up again, for it is in the 
 hour before dinner that Ministers and other 
 important speakers usually rise. The House 
 does not adjourn for dinner, but sits continu- 
 ously, and the hours between half-past seven 
 and nine, when the benches are nearly empty, 
 is the time when new and shy Members, if they 
 are wise, get used to the sound of their voices in 
 the House. At half-past nine the House fills 
 up again, and often, if the debate is a live one, 
 the best speaking of the day is heard now, 
 for sensibility is keenest after a wise dinner. 
 At eleven, in normal conditions, the House 
 rises. The cry "Who goes home?" echoes 
 through the Lobbies, traditional from the days 
 when it was safer to have company in the 
 streets at night. 
 
 In appearance the House of Commons is very 
 like a medium- sized panelled Nonconformist 
 chapel, with the Speaker's Chair at the east 
 end opposite the door, which opens out on to 
 the Members' Lobby, a large round hall into
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 19 
 
 which, from the Press Gallery, you can just 
 see through the glass doors. Some twelve feet 
 in from the door there is a brass plate across 
 the carpet which is known as the Bar, and marks 
 the boundary of the floor of the House. Be- 
 tween the Bar and the door you are technically 
 not in the House, and may stand about listen- 
 ing, but not officially visible to the Speaker ; 
 but when you have crossed the Bar you must 
 make your way to your seat, bowing in the 
 direction of the Speaker, not to him, but to the 
 altar of St. Stephen's, which once stood where 
 his chair is. There is a wide centre aisle lead- 
 ing to the Table, which is in front of the 
 Speaker's Chair. The green carpet of the 
 room is over a grated floor, through which 
 fresh air, drawn in from the river, and cleansed 
 of its microbes and of its life at the same time, 
 ascends into the chamber. When they are 
 searching the cellars below for Guy Fawkes 
 or Sinn Fein, or replacing the cotton-wool 
 through which the air is passed, you can see the 
 lights moving about through the carpet. The 
 artificial lighting is from thick glass in the 
 ceiling, and by reason of its yellow quality 
 simulates daylight well. The benches are 
 green like the carpet, and at night, when the 
 dark red curtains are drawn, the chamber looks 
 very cosy.
 
 20 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 These details, it is to be hoped, are not too 
 trivial for chronicling about so great a room, and 
 they are set down here because it is just the 
 things that are very familiar that usually escape 
 being told to those who have never seen them. 
 The benches run lengthwise to the chamber, 
 and are divided into four blocks by a narrow 
 transept called the gangway ; and it may help 
 those who do not know the House to forma better 
 idea of its debates to describe the topography 
 of the various party and personal groupings. 
 (Those who know all about it may be advised 
 to skip a few pages.) Three out of the four 
 blocks are occupied mainly by the Government 
 and its supporters. Immediately to the right of 
 the Speaker's Chair is the Front Ministerial 
 Bench, where sit the members of the Govern- 
 ment, or as many of them as there is room for 
 or as want to be in the House. The one who is 
 speaking usually moves towards the middle 
 of the bench so as to be opposite the box at the 
 end of the table, and have something to thump 
 out his arguments on. It is one of the privileges 
 of Ministers (and also of the Front Opposition 
 bench opposite) to put their feet up on the 
 table, but when their legs are short they have 
 to get their shoulders well down to reach it, 
 giving the impression of men trying to stand 
 on their heads. It is curious to watch the
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 21 
 
 various mannerisms of Ministers listening to 
 criticism. Mr. Lloyd George shows by his face 
 and an affirmative nod or negative shake of the 
 head what is passing through his mind the 
 clouds and sunshine chase across his face ; Mr. 
 Churchill will often lean forward with his elbows 
 on his knees, make paper triangles, and twirl 
 them round industriously on his joined thumbs. 
 Sir Gordon Hewart sits Sphinx-like and expres- 
 sionless ; Mr. Bonar Law used to show that he 
 was paying attention by opening his eyes 
 wider ; Sir Eric Geddes by lifting up a leg and 
 nursing it. No reputation ever stands still 
 there. Mr. Chamberlain's, despite his mastery 
 of Parliamentary form and style, has dropped 
 since he became leader of the House, Sir Gordon 
 Hewart's has risen, and he is now the hope of 
 those who work for the return of the Liberal 
 Independents, and by some is being thought of 
 as a possible leader. Sir Eric Geddes, after a 
 long period of depreciation, is beginning to be 
 valued as the time comes for him to leave 
 political life. Mr. Cecil Harmsworth, who 
 always sits at the end of the Front Bench, 
 manages to be both discreet and well liked as 
 Under- Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and from 
 the same bench you may hear the even mezzo 
 forte common sense of Sir Robert Home, the 
 graceful argument of Mr. Stanley Baldwin,
 
 22 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 his successor at the Board of Trade, the defiant 
 and official sforzando somewhat too dry and 
 stiff for his years of Sir Philip Graeme, and 
 the staccato syncopation of Commander Hilton 
 Young. Nor should one forget Sir Hamar 
 Greenwood on his day, with his thunderous 
 insistence on the expletively obvious, playing 
 his Irish nocturnes (this rut of musical meta- 
 phore is hard to get out of) like a muscular 
 collier wrestling with the Battle of. Prague. 
 
 Behind the Front Bench are Sir John Rees, a 
 Liberal Coalitionist, who devotes an eighteenth- 
 century elegance of diction to the service of 
 mid- Victorian reaction ; Sir Philip Sassoon, 
 Private Secretary of the Prime Minister, 
 caricatured by Mr. Max Beerbohm as a Jewish 
 Buddha, squatting silent and wise ; Mr. 
 Ormsby-Gore, a son-in-law of the Marquis of 
 Salisbury, a Cecilian with the fire of energy 
 and ambition in him, rising rapidly in esteem 
 and effectiveness ; and those twin Coalitionists, 
 the Liberal Captain Coote, cold as beseems a 
 Balliol man, but incisive and independent of 
 mind, and the so-called Conservative Captain 
 Elliot, bubbling with energy and pullulating 
 with ideas ; Mr. Leng-Sturrock, amiably 
 cynical ; Sir Henry Craik, plaintively Tory. 
 Here, too, before he moved over to the Liberal 
 benches, Lord Robert Cecil used to sit.
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 23 
 
 Across the gangway on the same side of the 
 House are several interesting groups. On the 
 middle bench sit the Ulster Members (Lord 
 Carson no longer with them), the Protestant 
 virtue sticking out of them like a hedgehog's 
 spines ; on the front bench the Workers' 
 League, a labour party with its claws 
 drawn ; and on the back row the Cecilian 
 group, open-eyed and progressive Conservatives. 
 From this block usually speaks Mr. Austin 
 Hopkinson. Son of a Chancery barrister, who 
 is ex- Vice- Chancellor of Manchester Univer- 
 sity, Mr. Hopkinson distinguished himself in 
 the war both as an officer and a private. He 
 had already attained quite remarkable success 
 in business when he enlisted as a private, and 
 he has evolved in Parliament a new philosophy 
 of the relations of capital and labour. The 
 duty of the capitalist, in his view, is to live 
 on as little and to work as hard and as skilfully 
 as he can. His idea of the capitalist-priest, 
 taking vows of poverty, in order to give his men 
 an example of efficiency, has repelled more than 
 it has attracted, but is far more amiable than 
 the stock caricature of the capitalist as a 
 grossly fat man with a monstrous cigar in the 
 corner of his mouth. He speaks with an 
 elegant diction and a somewhat affected and 
 mincing manner ; he never quite agrees with
 
 24 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 anybody else ; but he is one of the men in this 
 Parliament who will be heard of again. 
 
 It is the fashion to decry the Parliament of 
 1918, but in truth it has some virtues that 
 previous Houses had not. Its opinions are 
 fluid, and it is as susceptible to a powerful 
 piece of rhetoric as a young man to beauty. 
 When one of the good men are speaking, you 
 can see its opinions changing like the sea under 
 the shadow of a cloud, or at the shudder of an 
 approaching wind. With all its faults it holds 
 up the mirror to the moods of the nation, and 
 in the present state of the country its open and 
 pliable mind is far more serviceable than the 
 frozen trench warfare of fixed principles. 
 
 We cross the floor of the House to its third 
 quarter, below the gangway on the Speaker's 
 left. Here are the remnant of the Old Irish 
 Nationalist Party, Mr. O'Connor, Mr. Devlin, 
 Major Redmond, and Mr. McVeagh ; a phalanx 
 of big business men ; and on the front row 
 the anti-wasters. These last, who are such 
 sirens in the constituencies, cut a very poor 
 figure in Parliament, and they have never been 
 able to meet the spenders on equal terms. 
 The best of them is the youngest, Mr. Esmond 
 Harmsworth, who is really a mid- Victorian 
 Radical ; and will probably do well with more 
 experience. But no party can live on a
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 25 
 
 negation. Mr. Bottomley speaks as well as 
 Mr. Asquith, and with a great deal of his 
 reticence and sonority, but his political ideas 
 get all their leaven from human ignorance 
 and folly, and his cynicism is sometimes 
 unpleasant. The Irishmen, on the other hand, 
 have faith in the ideal and the gift of rhetoric, 
 which starts tears to the eyes and passionate 
 longing to be on the side of men who can lose 
 so eloquently. But the old bouquet that they 
 raise for us to smell has lost its fragrance, and 
 the canker of disappointment has devoured its 
 petals. How bitterly liberty has mocked their 
 efforts 
 
 Forth sprang the impassioned queen her lord to clasp ! 
 
 Again that consummation she essayed ; 
 But the unsubstantial form eludes her grasp 
 As often as that eager grasp was made. 
 The phantom parts but parts to reunite 
 And reassume its place before her sight. 
 
 The fourth quarter of the Benches includes 
 the Independent Liberals and the Labour 
 men. Most conspicuous among them, and in 
 some ways the most remarkable figure in the 
 Opposition, is Commander Kenworthy, who 
 sits at the end of the second row. Next to the 
 Prime Minister and the law officers, he works 
 harder than anyone in the House. He is 
 reputed to have a staff of secretaries whom he
 
 26 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 keeps busy reading for him and working up 
 subjects, and his interests are as extensive as 
 they are detailed. He came into fame as a 
 rationaliser of the Russian revolution and as a 
 bitter enemy of our interference with Bolshevism 
 in Eastern Europe ; and the secret mental 
 sympathy which sprang up between him and 
 the Prime Minister at that time has never 
 withered since. He speaks fluently but not 
 very well, for he lacks the art of persuasion, and 
 he dissipates his activities over too wide a range 
 of subjects. But he has a thick skin, courage, 
 immense industry, and an unmistakable flair, 
 and his services to the Opposition have been 
 invaluable. He will hold office some day 
 the navy, one of the subjects on which he 
 speaks with authority, might find him oppor- 
 tunity for useful constructive work. An 
 orthodox Liberal he is not, and his develop- 
 ment, one suspects, will be towards a new 
 Radicalism, and later in life towards Toryism. 
 His neighbour in the House, and friend, Colonel 
 Wedgwood, is a dissatisfied Liberal who 
 nominally belongs to the Labour Party, but 
 remains a Liberal still, for a Liberal creed is 
 capable of almost indefinite extension to the 
 left. He is the frankest speaker in the House, 
 and a man of brilliant apercus usually conveyed 
 in asides rather than on the main current of his
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 27 
 
 argument. Other men in this quarter of the 
 House are Captain W. Wedgwood Benn, a 
 sincere Liberal, who marshals his facts well, 
 but whose exposition of principles suffers some- 
 times from the entanglement of his coat-tails ; 
 Mr. George Lambert, one of the few whole- 
 hearted Liberal individualists left, and a very 
 trenchant speaker ; Sir Donald Maclean, 
 looking his part as Liberal leader, sincere if 
 somewhat conventional in his Liberal instinct, 
 and at times tending to the forcible- feeble ; 
 General Seely, gallant leader of forlorn hopes ; 
 Mr. Hogge, who, with Mr. John Wallace, has 
 latterly played the part of liaison officer between 
 the Coalition and Independent Liberal wings. 
 But in so short a chapter one must avoid the 
 sin of cataloguing. 
 
 To sit above the Speaker's Chair for eighteen 
 months and to overlook the wonderful game 
 below, to see so many men working for justice 
 as they conceive it, to feel one's sympathies 
 borne now this way now that on the strong 
 currents of argument, and to realise how much 
 more goes to the making of politics than mere 
 intellectual ability, or even moral conviction 
 there is no such cure for the despair that so 
 easily overcomes the student of politics groping 
 amongst ideas in the solitude of his room, or for 
 the flippancy towards the workers in politics
 
 28 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 which is so common amongst clever theorists 
 who take care to avoid the dust and heat of the 
 work-room. On the other hand, to sit and 
 watch for twenty years as some have done 
 would be to become a dungeon of Parlia- 
 mentary learning, and to acquire such an 
 awe before the workings of this greatest of 
 political institutions that criticism would 
 become almost an irreverence. And that must 
 be the writer's excuse for writing on Parlia- 
 mentary figures from the fullness of new 
 acquaintance before the freshness of impres- 
 sions becomes blurred and the freedom of an 
 observer becomes mortgaged to respect. 
 
 He has several times been asked by old 
 gallerymen what is the dominant impression 
 that he gets of the House coming fresh to it, or 
 what is the scene that lingers most in his 
 memory, or what is the best speech that he has 
 heard. The dominant impression is one of the 
 amazing sincerity, if not of politics, at any rate of 
 the average Members of the House of Commons. 
 The scene that still lingers from first experience 
 is the banging of the doors of the Chamber 
 when Blackrod, the House of Lords messenger, 
 approaches with a summons to hear the Royal 
 assent given to a Bill, and knocks three 
 times at the door for admittance. It is a 
 vivid reminder of the past, when the Commons
 
 THE PRESS GALLERY 29 
 
 had to fight for its powers against an arrogant 
 and sometimes even violent Executive. The 
 three best speeches in the time he has been there 
 were undoubtedly the Prime Minister's on 
 Ireland in December 1920, Mr. Churchill's 
 speech defending the Government for its 
 punishment of General Dyer for his share in 
 the Amritsar outrages, and Lord Sumner's 
 speech on the same subject, but on the other 
 side, in the House of Lords. The first was a 
 wonderful example of imaginative poise and 
 balance, the second of skill in the handling 
 and conversion of opposition, and the third 
 of the power of intellectualism, hard, cold, 
 and uninspired.
 
 LORD GREY 
 OF FALLODON
 
 LORD GREY OF FALLODON 
 
 ALL Lord Grey's political life has been 
 the expression not of ambitions nor 
 even of views so much as of character. 
 His is a type of character happily not un- 
 common in England, especially amongst the 
 lesser nobility from which he sprang, but it 
 eludes description, as very smooth, regular 
 features defy caricature. Its distinction lies in 
 the avoidance of saliences and eccentricities 
 whether of expression, of thought, or of 
 emotion ; in being the hero of no story and 
 the author of no epigram ; in a reserve that 
 is too proud to be vain, too shy to be arrogant. 
 Some men gain their place in politics by their 
 power of understanding other people, others 
 by making it necessary for others to under- 
 stand them, and Lord Grey is amongst these 
 last. He has never been anything but himself ; 
 he yields nothing to the mood of his audience 
 and is apparently indifferent to its applause ; 
 outwardly calm and self-contained, he never 
 strains a subject or the attention of his listeners, 
 3 33
 
 34 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 but maintains both on the same even high level 
 of seriousness. 
 
 Men of this temperament have always com- 
 manded great influence in counsel, especially 
 when, as in Lord Grey's case, there is 
 obvious ability without the suspicion of clever- 
 ness. For in politics cleverness is always a 
 danger signal, and often substitutes dissent for 
 conviction, even at the moment when it seems 
 to be most effective. In this disarming sug- 
 gestion of the plain man, taking his day's 
 work as it comes and dealing with difficulties 
 as they arise, each on its merits and without 
 reference to theories or formulae, Lord Grey is 
 more like the late Duke of Devonshire than 
 anyone else in our politics. There is probably 
 more art in his persuasiveness than appears, 
 but it is not that of studied effects, but rather 
 the product of long hours of half-conscious 
 cerebration. He rarely makes a composition 
 of his speeches beforehand, but, like every 
 fly-fisher, he is fond of solitude, and it was 
 perhaps at these moments that he acquired 
 the art of thinking aloud persuasively, which is 
 their distinguishing quality. On the other 
 hand, some of his speeches, notably that on 
 the Monday before the war, one on arbitration 
 with the United States made in 1911, and the 
 more recent speech on the Government's Home
 
 LORD GREY OF FALLODON 35 
 
 Rule Bill in the Lords, have been fine examples 
 of set oratory, all the more impressive from 
 their complete lack of ornament. But excellent 
 as they are in arrangement, and carried through 
 on an even level of seriousness, his speeches 
 owe their power mainly to the impression of 
 high character and plain, sincere thinking. 
 
 Lord Grey gave few indications of greatness 
 before the revival of Liberalism which began 
 after the Boer War. At Winchester and 
 Balliol he was serious without priggishness, but 
 also without distinction, except at tennis, and 
 no prophecy of Jowett's is reported about him, 
 like those about Asquith and Lansdowne. His 
 first acquaintance with affairs was gained as 
 private secretary to Sir Evelyn Baring (as he 
 then was), in Egypt, but no quality has been 
 attributed to his work at this time but that of 
 even competence, and he would doubtfully 
 have obtained the post of Under- Secretary in 
 the Liberal Government of 1892-1895 but for 
 the influence of Lord Rosebery. Already the 
 cleavage in the Liberal Party was evident, 
 which later was to go so deep, for Gladstone 
 at this time was prepared to discuss the 
 evacuation of Egypt but for the resistance and, 
 indeed, the veto of Lord Rosebery, and the 
 Under-Secretary was on the side of his Foreign 
 Office chief and against the Gladstonian
 
 36 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 impulse. It was Grey, again, who, as Under- 
 secretary, gave the warning to France about 
 the Nile which later became the stock quotation 
 on our side of the Fashoda controversy. And 
 Grey was the strongest member of the Liberal 
 League triumvirate which sought to combat 
 what it regarded as the excesses of the anti- 
 Imperial reaction in the Liberal Party in the 
 decade round the turn of the century. He 
 refused to oppose the reconquest of the Sudan, 
 believed in the future of British East Africa, 
 supported the policy of the South African 
 War, and dissociated himself from the rancour 
 of Liberal criticism on the moribund Chamber- 
 lain-Balfour Ministry. Yet he was never a 
 sterile Whig, for his views on Labour policy 
 were frequently advanced (in this respect he 
 was like Lord Haldane, another of the 
 triumvirs), and though he had some reserves 
 on Gladstonian Home Rule, he was always 
 loyal to the Irish National demands. But on 
 foreign and Imperial policy he not merely 
 disagreed with the policy of the numerical 
 majority of his party, but regarded it with 
 alarm. When the Liberal Government of 1906 
 was being formed, he refused the Foreign Office 
 unless Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, against 
 whom the Liberal Leaguers had been in revolt, 
 went to the Lords, and it was with the greatest
 
 LORD GREY OF FALLODON 37 
 
 difficulty that he was induced to waive this 
 condition. There is a vein of stubbornness 
 in his nature which on matters of importance 
 indisposes him to compromise. 
 
 These facts need to be remembered if we 
 are justly to estimate the quality of his conduct 
 of foreign affairs in the eight years before the 
 war. The election of 1906, except to the 
 limited extent to which the relative merits of 
 Free Trade and Protection were the issue, was 
 almost as heavy a defeat for the Liberal 
 Leaguers as for the Conservatives, and the new 
 Foreign Secretary entered on his work knowing 
 that the sentiment of the majority in his party 
 was out of sympathy with his views. Already, 
 while the General Election was still in progress, 
 he had begun those conversations with France 
 which led inevitably to our Alliance in the late 
 war, and there can be little doubt that, had 
 their meaning and implications been under- 
 stood, the whole policy would at that time 
 have been repudiated by the vast majority of 
 Liberals to their bitter regret later. Never 
 has a Foreign Secretary been confronted with 
 problems so grave as Sir Edward Grey's in 
 these years, and never amid domestic circum- 
 stances of such difficulty and delicacy. 
 Throughout the whole of this period there was 
 a powerful opposition within the party, and on
 
 88 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 that fateful Monday before the war when 
 Grey, for the first time, laid the whole facts 
 before the country, he could hope, but could 
 not know for certain, that he would carry the 
 House with him. There is probably not 
 another man in politics who, in these circum- 
 stances, could have kept on an even keel all 
 through these years, have avoided the innumer- 
 able temptations to political dishonesty, and 
 steadily improved his moral influence all the 
 time. In 1906 little more than a name, in 
 1914 he wielded a moral sway such as hardly 
 another Foreign Secretary has ever done. 
 With every one of his enemies and he had 
 many ransacking everything that he said 
 about our relations with Germany, none ever 
 succeeded in putting his hand on a single 
 sentence and saying, " There you deceived us." 
 The most they could ever say with truth was : 
 " You did not tell us all." It will always be 
 one of the most interesting speculations in 
 politics how the event would have shaped 
 itself if he had. 
 
 Lord Grey derived much strength from the 
 extreme candour with which he always stated 
 his views on the relations between party 
 politics and foreign policy. He was one of the 
 earliest advocates of the continuity of foreign 
 policy, and on taking office he avowed his
 
 LORD GREY OF FALLODON 39 
 
 intention of continuing the foreign policy of 
 Lord Lansdowne. There is no hard-and-fast 
 distinction between home and foreign affairs, 
 as the events of the last seven years have 
 proved, and that being so, it is a hard saying, 
 without qualification, that a Liberal foreign 
 policy is the same as a Conservative, and the 
 other way about. What Lord Grey meant 
 was that, inasmuch as its risks are enormous, 
 and are carried by the whole nation, foreign 
 policy should be a national policy fused of 
 Liberal and Conservative traditions. In fact, 
 throughout the whole of his period as Foreign 
 Secretary he was a Coalition Minister in a 
 Liberal Government, and he missed no oppor- 
 tunity of making that clear. What he con- 
 cealed was never the ends but only the means 
 of policy, but even this degree of concealment 
 has to this day made him an object of some 
 suspicion to Liberals of a certain type. His 
 defence would be that public diplomacy means 
 frankness as to objects and principles of 
 foreign policy, and can never mean that all its 
 conversations must be held in the street within 
 earshot of anyone who cares to listen. The 
 steady growth in his reputation for singleness 
 of mind is proof, if proof were needed, that 
 coalition need not mean doubleness of policy 
 unless there is a doubleness of mind.
 
 40 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Lord Grey is sensitively humane, and the 
 cruelty and strain of the war affected him 
 perhaps more than most. His object in 
 developing the Entente with France, and con- 
 cluding the peace with Russia, was to ensure 
 the peace of the world, and the outbreak of the 
 war was a bitter disappointment of his hopes. 
 His second hope, that the war would be short, 
 was disappointed too, and the accusation, 
 frequently made abroad, that he was respon- 
 sible for the war cut him like a knife. The 
 very bitterest German cartoon in the whole 
 war was one that depicted him as Dorian 
 Grey, standing as he might have done at the 
 top of the Foreign Office staircase and survey- 
 ing a hideous portrait of himself dripping with 
 blood. For a time it looked as though the 
 cruelty of war and his partial blindness had 
 broken him for politics. But peace has 
 brought him back into politics with restored 
 sight and health, and with perhaps the first 
 real ambition he has yet entertained in his 
 life namely, to do solid and enduring work for 
 the peace of the world. The tribulation of the 
 war has removed some of the old limitations of 
 temperament without changing his views. He 
 still, as in 1911, holds to his belief in the friend- 
 ship of England and America as the key to the 
 future of the world. He still repudiates the
 
 LORD GREY OF FALLODON 41 
 
 old doctrine which Salisbury and the stronger 
 wing of the Liberal Party held of splendid 
 isolation, and now, as in 1906, he believes that 
 we must have firm and constant friends in 
 Europe, and that of these the friendship of 
 France is the most necessary and the most 
 fertile of beneficence. But he has found in 
 the League of Nations a new instrument, and 
 a translation into the practical forms of legis- 
 lation of the old aspirations of the Concert of 
 Europe which so fascinated Gladstone. He 
 has repudiated the idea of coalition, but that 
 is a matter of phrasing rather than of sub- 
 stance. By coalition he understands a loose 
 amalgam of inconsistent political ideas ; by 
 party government he means a college of men 
 with common ideas of policy, but not neces- 
 sarily of men all drawn from one party, for 
 that, if it were desirable, is not possible so far 
 as we can see ahead. To this work he brings 
 not genius or impressionism, but faith and 
 simplicity of mind.
 
 THE CECILIANS
 
 LORD ROBERT CECIL AND MR. A. J. BALFOUR. 
 
 [L.N.A.
 
 II 
 
 THE CECILIANS 
 
 MR. BALFOUR, now floridly benign, a 
 rich oracular voice issuing forth from 
 the obscurer recesses of the Coalition ; 
 Lord Robert Cecil, a Hamlet in politics, noble 
 of sentiment and frail of purpose ; Lord Hugh, 
 Mercutio in a cowl, intellectually athletic on 
 a diet of dilemmas ; Mr. Ormsby-Gore, still 
 looking like an Eton boy, full of gentleness 
 and good sense ; as First, Second, and Third 
 Gentlemen, the trenchant Lord Winterton, Mr. 
 Walter Guinness the frank, and Mr. Edward 
 Wood the earnest, not forgetting Lord Wolmer, 
 though one seldom sees him, and, of course, 
 the Marquess of Salisbury, carrying but hardly 
 wielding the sword of his great name. These 
 are the Cecilians. Besides Mr. Wood, Under- 
 secretary of the Colonies, only one, Mr. 
 Balfour, sits on the Front Bench, but wherever 
 they sit the Cecilians have their minds at 
 any rate on the Front Bench. They were 
 born to the Ministry, whether they get there 
 or not. 
 
 For a generation before the war they had 
 
 45
 
 46 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 been fighting a losing battle. It was they and 
 their kind who had to do most of the fighting 
 with Gladstone, and they survived the frontal 
 attacks of the Liberals only to be outflanked 
 and ousted from power by their ex-Radical 
 janissaries. They still hold out in a corner of 
 the stricken field, strongly entrenched in the 
 old hall garden, but Mr. Balfour, one fears, was 
 the last of the hereditary rulers of the Con- 
 servative Party. Ought one to fear, or rather 
 to rejoice, over it? There is room for both 
 sentiments. It would be a grave matter if the 
 great political virtues that one associates with 
 the Cecilians were lost to the party by reason of 
 their faults ; on the other hand, one wonders, 
 after all, whether these virtues will not have a 
 better chance when their owners have to fight 
 for their decisions instead of promulgating 
 them. 
 
 For twenty years before the war there was 
 hardly an enthusiasm in politics that did not 
 find its enemies in the Cecils. Irish Home 
 Rule, Tariff Reform, Imperial Federation, 
 nearly every suggestion for organic change has 
 withered alike under their sympathy and their 
 opposition ; every passion and nearly every 
 hope in politics owes them a grudge, none the 
 less deep because their criticism has often been 
 wise and justified by the event. Isolated on a
 
 THE CECILIANS 47 
 
 pinnacle of I told you so, it is nothing to be 
 surprised at that their influence in the party 
 should have sunk so low. But Cecilians who 
 could construct as well as they criticise, attack 
 as skilfully as they retire, find as many good 
 reasons for doing something as for doing nothing 
 in particular, might again be a great power 
 in politics, and it may be that the final 
 overthrow of the legitimist dynasty in the 
 party will contribute to this change of their 
 nature. 
 
 From Mr. Balfour nothing is to be hoped. 
 He does not seriously believe in politics as an 
 instrument of human progress ; to him they 
 are merely the art of neutralising forces and 
 engaging them in an equilibrium that is more or 
 less stable so that the really serious activities 
 of the world may not be interfered with. 
 What these are, may vary. For Mr. Balfour 
 they are the critical enjoyment of the intellec- 
 tual play of human life, with himself in a 
 comfortable box ; for others, the making of 
 money ; he himself has said that what makes 
 most difference to human happiness is science, 
 thinking that, perhaps, because he knows so 
 little about it. Office he loves, not for the 
 sake of exercising power, but for the feeling 
 that it gives him that he could exercise power 
 if he chose to do so. In fact, he no more
 
 48 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 influences the policy of the Coalition than Jonah 
 steered the whale. 
 
 Outside the Government his keen analytic 
 mind might have been of inestimable service ; 
 but then he could not have been behind the 
 scenes, where he loves to be, and besides, if 
 there be anything permanent in Coalition, he 
 wants to be in and to see that no Curzon jumps 
 a Cecil claim. And so he is a sleeping partner 
 in the Government, as he was in his own 
 Government when Mr. Chamberlain was at 
 the height of his power, but with this differ- 
 ence, that he is many degrees more removed 
 from the throne of popular favour and that in 
 the meantime most of his party has slipped 
 away from him. Hard fate for one who worked 
 so hard for party unity as Mr. Balfour has done, 
 and yet not unjust. He preferred the forms 
 of party unity to the living convictions and 
 enthusiasms that make party real, and he is 
 left clasping the unsubstantial shadow. The 
 most brilliant and the most sterile mind in 
 modern politics, he is not the man who can 
 breathe life into the cold Cecilian ideals. 
 
 Are any of the other Cecilians in better 
 plight ? Conservatism still stands for the idea 
 of discipline in public life, for 
 
 degree, priority and place, 
 Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, 
 Office and custom in all line of order
 
 THE CECILIANS 49 
 
 for " that generous loyalty to rank and sex, 
 that proud submission, that dignified obedience, 
 that subordination of the heart which kept 
 alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an 
 exalted freedom," and with all Cecilians con- 
 ceptions like these are bred in the bone, matters 
 not of argument but of instinct. Moreover, 
 the sceptical and critical English mind, if it is 
 rarely found on the summits of achievement, is 
 as precious as lime in the valleys below, and 
 one cannot deprive Conservatism of its habit of 
 scepticism towards the new and unknown, and 
 its acid analysis of enthusiasms without its 
 being the loser. When all is said against the 
 Cecils they have always contributed these 
 gifts to politics. Conservatism will not get 
 these things from the new Radical school 
 within the party. To the newer school of 
 Conservatism, the connection with a Radical 
 of some sort, whether called Disraeli or Cham- 
 berlain or Lloyd George, is life ; to the old 
 school it is death. That is the moral of Mr. 
 Balfour's career. Can our modern Cecils 
 remake Toryism in new forms ? 
 
 The chief hope is in Lord Robert Cecil ; 
 Lord Hugh is the abler man, but with him 
 politics at best are only the clamp of ordered 
 society, and the springs which move its elabo- 
 rate mechanism are to be found in religion 
 4
 
 50 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 alone. The age is not really irreligious, but the 
 semi-political forms of Lord Hugh's religion do 
 not attract it, and for all the brilliancy of his 
 intellect he is disqualified for leadership. Lord 
 Robert Cecil is in better case, and less than a 
 year ago he seemed marked out to be the real 
 leader of the Opposition. He has dignity and 
 a personality ; he speaks well enough always, 
 and, when he is moved, with eloquence ; he 
 has character and the broad humanity of his 
 class, something of Mr. Balfour's dialectical 
 skill combined with greater fertility of idea and 
 more industry. The House thought much of 
 him, and from the Labour benches in particular 
 he always had an attentive and sympathetic 
 hearing. For between Toryism and Socialism 
 there is a natural sympathy ; Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer used to call Socialism the new Toryism, 
 because both accepted the theory of the omni- 
 potent State. Had Lord Robert Cecil's thought 
 run into the forms of Tory Socialism he might 
 have been assured of a following in the country, 
 if not in the House, and Socialism, which 
 suffers from the blight of materialism, would 
 have gained by contact with his idealism. It 
 might also have learnt something of the arts 
 of political dodgery, which the Cecils have 
 cultivated not out of badness, but by way of 
 concession to a world that they believe would
 
 THE CECILIANS 51 
 
 not understand them if they were wholly 
 frank. 
 
 But the Cecils, though some of them believe 
 in an omnipotent Church, have always opposed 
 the idea of an omnipotent State, and if Lord 
 Robert was ever under temptation to develop 
 in that direction, the war would have cured 
 him of it. He is the keenest champion of 
 individual rights, bitterly critical of bureau- 
 cracy, and anxious to contract the functions of 
 the State. These intellectual convictions were 
 deepened by the long anguish of the war, and 
 when at the end of it there emerged the con- 
 ception of the League of Nations he embraced 
 it as a new gospel. The League took a place 
 in his political philosophy comparable to that 
 occupied by the Church with Lord Hugh, and 
 by Mr. Balfour's conception of party as an 
 insurance policy in a world full of accidents. 
 It fitted in perfectly with his humane tempera- 
 ment and his political philosophy. Why should 
 not a Cecil, repelled by the coarse enthusiasms 
 of ordinary politics, find in the League a 
 diviner air, where perfect witness is in the eyes 
 of all-judging Jove alone, and the lost political 
 greatness of the family clothe itself in a 
 new cosmopolitan purple ? An enemy of the 
 pretensions of the State over the individual, 
 why should he not seek to curb its excesses in
 
 52 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 international affairs too and help to erect a 
 new Areopagus ? At last a Cecil was enthu- 
 siastic and even atune with the spirit of the age. 
 Anything seemed possible. 
 
 These hopes that were formed of Lord 
 Robert have not been realised, and the reason 
 is that he cannot fight. Something always gets 
 in the way, when there is something to be done 
 as well as said, either consideration for his 
 party, or the dislike that all his class have of a 
 scene, or an instinctive Oxford repugnance for 
 extremes, or it may be a temperamental reluct- 
 ance to hurt anyone's feelings. He suffers 
 from the fatal defect in rough-and-tumble 
 politics of always seeing the strength of the 
 argument against him, and he can no more 
 stand up to the Prime Minister in a contro- 
 versy than he could box with a dinosaur. It 
 is not cowardice, but the intellectual fascina- 
 tion that the arguments of the other side have 
 over him. When he makes a speech he cannot 
 keep them out. 
 
 " I don't know," " Well, they may be right," 
 *' I don't wish to dogmatise," " I may be 
 wrong," and with each successive phrase of 
 that kind the spirits of his sympathisers droop 
 more and more. He forgets that most human 
 beings don't want to make up their own minds, 
 but like someone to do that irksome work for
 
 THE CECILIANS 53 
 
 them. But if he is so respectful to his oppo- 
 nents' arguments when he himself is stating 
 them, is it wonderful that when they come like 
 fire from the mouth of that redoubtable dragon 
 of debate, the Prime Minister, Lord Robert 
 should be no St. George ? Our Hamlet solilo- 
 quises threateningly, but when the talk is over 
 he rarely votes against the Government, let 
 alone sets out to kill it. Claudio and Gertrude 
 still sit on the throne of his father, and if there 
 is any killing by a Cecil the first to perish will 
 be Polonius, he of the Foreign Office. 
 
 But if the Cecilians have still to learn the 
 work of opposition, they have shown that they 
 can strike fire and conceive a genuine enthu- 
 siasm. Mr. Balfour's Zionism is something, 
 Lord Robert Cecil's advocacy of the League of 
 Nations and his pity for the plight of Eastern 
 Europe have had power and sincerity, and his 
 humanity moves one. The younger men, too, 
 have done well on Ireland and shown that, if 
 they cannot as yet execute, they can conceive 
 a problem in a big-hearted and generous way. 
 These are promising signs, and there are still 
 the makings of a new party, not big, perhaps, 
 but influential and distinguished. 
 
 If all the Liberal Party were Asquiths, there 
 would by this time have been an alliance between 
 them and the Cecilians. They have much in
 
 54 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 common their coldness and scepticism, their 
 attachment to forms, their dislike of enthu- 
 siasms and general ideas, their distrust of 
 bureaucracy, their views on foreign affairs, on 
 national economy, and on fiscal policy. 1 Liberals 
 are not all Asquiths and Greys, but when the 
 next split comes amongst the Independent 
 Liberals and that will be as soon as they are 
 more numerous there will be some, one fancies, 
 who will find their nearest friends in their old 
 enemies, the Cecilians. For the old party 
 divisions are breaking down, and in the new 
 ones that are forming there will be unexpected 
 regroupings. 
 
 1 Since this essay was written, Lord Robert Cecil has crossed 
 the floor of the House and now sits on the Front Opposition 
 Bench, amongst the Independent Liberals.
 
 SIR ROBERT 
 HORNE
 
 SIR ROBERT HORNE.
 
 SIR ROBERT HORNE, forty-nine, homo 
 novissimus, son of a Scots parish 
 minister, Grammar School boy (or its 
 Scots equivalent), Glasgow and Edinburgh 
 Universities, lecturer in philosophy in the 
 University of Wales, and later teacher of 
 another kind of philosophy, and at more profit 
 to himself as a successful member of the Scots 
 Bar, at the National Service Ministry when 
 war came and associated with Sir Eric Geddes 
 on the Army railways in France and at the 
 Admiralty, Member of Parliament at the 
 Armistice Election, Minister of Labour last 
 year, this year President of the Board of 
 Trade, next year Chancellor of the Exchequer l 
 - there never was in politics quite so sudden 
 arrival and rapid advancement. The English 
 Attorney- General only eight years ago was 
 still a junior on the Northern Circuit, but he 
 was interested in politics before the law, and 
 
 1 This was written in December 1920, but the writer, 
 though he has added some modern sentences to the article, 
 cannot bring himself to efface this prophecy. 
 
 67
 
 58 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 even then had a fair record of political work 
 behind him. Sir Eric Geddes, too, swam 
 suddenly into the heavens, but as a comet 
 rather than a fixed luminary. Sir Robert, 
 more fortunate, has escaped attachment to an 
 orbit of expertise and is free to range the whole 
 field of politics. 
 
 He was certainly lucky in the moment of his 
 arrival in politics, when the Prime Minister was 
 on the look-out for new men and anxious to 
 found a new school of administrators. But 
 his detractors success so rapid could not hope 
 to escape them are wrong who say that he is 
 only lucky. The secret of his power is elusive. 
 It is not in his speaking, which has a firm dis- 
 ciplined tread without wings or seduction, 
 strong in argument and often racy in expres- 
 sion, but no precipitant of emotion. A 
 vibrant voice, a friendly presence, and a good 
 physique have helped, but alone could not 
 explain success so remarkable. He is said to 
 be a good administrator, and although one can 
 well believe it in his case, civil servants will 
 say that of every political chief who can sign 
 his name, and the less he does besides that the 
 more they think it. Nor, again, are we to see 
 in the last two or three years the sudden matur- 
 ing of long years of patiently-prepared plans. 
 
 " Dinna be a fool," his mother is reported to
 
 SIR ROBERT HORNE 59 
 
 have replied when he asked her opinion about 
 his taking office, " come name." Sir Robert 
 Home takes long views and is ambitious, but 
 he is not a cold or calculating man, nor yet is 
 he in politics because he is possessed by a 
 faith that will give him no rest, or for any 
 other reason than that it is work that he likes 
 and for which his marked aptitude has taken 
 no one by surprise so much as himself. 
 
 The characteristics that have embanked 
 his great natural abilities to success are, one 
 should say, high animal spirits, the Scottish 
 sense of noble adventure, and an irrepressible 
 fondness for the stuff of human nature 
 qualities that have never been given the high 
 place in the hierarchy of political virtues that 
 is their due. For politics are full of walking 
 skeletons with labels attached. Once they 
 were men to whom politics were the conflict 
 of human feelings, an enlargement on a great 
 scale of those expansions of affection, of ideas 
 and pleasures shared, of help given and received 
 which make the best part of human life. But 
 someone came one day and attached a label 
 to them ; ever afterwards they were expected 
 to illustrate what was written on the label, 
 and if they departed from it they were thought 
 to be men of no principle ; and so they became 
 mere lines in some parallelogram of forces, all
 
 60 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 no viscera. One sees this sort 
 of thing happening every day in politics, and 
 it is because they enable a man to resist the 
 devitalisation of principles that the qualities 
 characteristic of Sir Robert Home have such 
 importance. He is said to have warmed both 
 hands at the fire of life ; he has heard as many 
 chimes at midnight as Lord Gladstone once 
 boasted ; he has been known to work hard all 
 day when in busy practice at the Bar and to 
 dance hard all night. 
 
 He likes young company for its easy birth 
 of ideas ; he has still enough philosophy to 
 find perennial interest in new views, fresh 
 generalisations of human life ; but always, 
 before he accepts them, he likes to see them 
 translated into the terms of human nature 
 and action ; without this rich vein of Scottish 
 caution he could hardly have remained until 
 to-day that treasure of hostesses, an eligible 
 dancing bachelor. He has something in com- 
 mon both with Sir Robert Walpole and with 
 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He has the 
 Walpole gift of seeing every political question 
 in the terms of human nature ; Walpole's 
 coarseness, which was behind his age, has been 
 refined in him to a genial and realistic view of 
 affairs illustrated from an inexhaustible fund 
 of good stories ; his humanity, so much in
 
 SIR ROBERT HORNE 61 
 
 advance of his age, has descended in full 
 measure. Again, without Bannerman's Liberal 
 faith, burning inwardly, he has his freshness, 
 his straightforwardness, and the bluntness that 
 often manages to be persuasive and even 
 coaxing. 
 
 The actual achievement of Sir Robert 
 Home, apart from his share in the settlement 
 of industrial strife, is not great. But more 
 important than the Legislation that comes from 
 a Department are the daily and hourly inter- 
 views which its head has to conduct with all 
 and sundry, and it is a Minister's handling of 
 these matters, far more than the changes that 
 he proposes in Parliament, that makes the time 
 jarring or smooth. He had gained some know- 
 ledge of labour matters at the Admiralty, and 
 doubtless it was his success there during the 
 war, of which the world knows nothing, that 
 took him to the Ministry of Labour at the 
 peace. 
 
 It was a dangerous and critical time in the 
 history of Labour politics, and a doctrinaire or 
 a viewy man might easily have brought about 
 a widespread conflagration. Sir Robert Home 
 was neither. He was personally liked by the 
 Labour men ; he gave the impression of open- 
 mindedness and of one who was piecing together 
 the parts of a new and enlightened policy of
 
 62 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 peace between Capital and Labour, and only 
 anxious to receive suggestions ; his newness to 
 politics, the fact that he was a Conservative, 
 and his appearance of modesty all helped him ; 
 but he succeeded most of all, as might be 
 expected, because he knew his subject very 
 well and knew his men. 
 
 The principal facts in Labour politics since 
 the Armistice are the series of defeats that 
 direct action, both the theory and the practice, 
 has suffered ; the definite retrogression of the 
 idea of nationalisation of industry, especially 
 amongst the miners, where it was strongest, 
 and the adoption by the miners of a principle, 
 capable of being extended to other trades, that 
 wages must stand in some relation to efficiency 
 and to output. In all these changes of opinion, 
 Sir Robert Home had a great share, and his 
 task, never an easy one, became very difficult 
 during the coal strike of this year. The miners 
 suspected him of being an owners' man, but 
 on the other hand, owners often had cause to 
 know that there was a rough side to his tongue. 
 The blame for the sudden stoppage of control 
 over the coal industry, which many thought 
 was responsible for the obstinacy of the strike, 
 was put on him ; and other critics held that 
 he was unnecessarily stubborn and uncom- 
 promising in his opposition to the " pool."
 
 SIR ROBERT HORNE 63 
 
 But throughout he was influenced by his views 
 of what was necessary for the efficiency of the 
 industry ; what in his opinion would diminish 
 output could not be for the good of the 
 workers. So great was the importance that 
 he attached to an alliance between trade 
 unionism and industrial efficiency, that he was 
 prepared to carry his resistance to almost any 
 lengths. He helped and was helped by the 
 growth of a moderate party amongst the 
 workers ; most of all he was helped by the 
 state of our national finance and the facts of 
 our industrial position. The estimate that 
 will be formed of Sir Robert Home's conduct 
 of the dispute will depend very largely on 
 whether behind this resistance to inefficiency 
 in the mining industry is a constructive policy 
 of industrial reform. 
 
 Sir Robert Home was born a Disraelian 
 Conservative, and he is still without any sort 
 of sympathy with the dogmatic side of 
 Liberalism. He has no faith in the extension 
 of State activity. The essence of trade is that 
 it is an adventure in which failures are the 
 stages of progress as officers' graves are the 
 milestones of Empire. State ownership is bad, 
 or at best a disagreeable alternative, because 
 it is assured against the consequences of 
 financial failure and must eschew the spirit of
 
 64 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 adventure that is the breath of business enter- 
 prise. An early convert to Tariff Reform, one 
 predicts that his tenure of his present office as 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer will modify his 
 views considerably, and that he will end by 
 rejecting Protectionist theory, and being a 
 Free Trader with some reserves. In labour 
 matters, he believes that there is no such thing 
 as absolute ownership either of work done or 
 profits made ; both should be regarded as a 
 trust, and he would probably prefer to express 
 the ideal relations of Capital and Labour in the 
 terms of a deed of partnership in work and its 
 rewards rather than in any other way, and the 
 practical problem is to discipline this partner- 
 ship in the terms of the general interest. While 
 he was still at the Board of Trade, he gave 
 much attention to finance. A member of the 
 Cabinet Committee on Finance, he early became 
 one of those who recognise finance as the 
 master of politics and incidentally a dragon 
 across the path of the present Government. 
 So far no one can say whether he is likely to 
 make a success of his office as Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer. Those who began by envying 
 him his promotion, a few months later were 
 pitying him for it so grave were his tasks. 
 
 It is too early to say that he has pieced 
 what he has learned since he entered politics
 
 SIR ROBERT HORNE 65 
 
 into a coherent system, but there is no one 
 else among the younger Conservatives who 
 looks like doing it. On him more than on 
 anyone else depends the permanence of an 
 alliance between the new Liberals and the 
 new Conservatives. Already, he seems marked 
 out as the natural successor of Mr. Bonar Law, 
 but one does not see him gaining the undisputed 
 headship of the Conservative Party which was 
 bestowed on Mr. Law by the accidents of 
 intestinal quarrel. As a Conservative pure and 
 simple, he has a future, but not one that will 
 bring out all of which he is capable. If he is 
 to be first Minister in the State and there are 
 those who think he may be it will be through 
 a new party formed by fusing the progressive 
 elements that now exist side by side within the 
 Coalition.
 
 LORD READING
 
 LORD READING.
 
 IV 
 LORD READING 
 
 KJFUS ISAACS was twenty-seven before 
 he found his way to the law. A rebel 
 at school, he presently ran away to 
 sea in the Blair Athol, where both romance and 
 indiscipline caught it very badly ; and then 
 an office stool in his father's business and 
 stockbroking in turn engaged his romantic 
 inattention. 
 
 At the Bar his success was immediate, and 
 at thirty-seven he took silk and was in every 
 case of importance. The contrast between 
 his early unsettlement and his extraordinary 
 brilliancy at the Bar has naturally made people 
 (always anxious to get their famous men con- 
 veniently labelled) think of him as a lawyer. 
 But he was never a lawyer in the sense in which 
 Benjamin and Jessel were lawyers, and, though 
 he had many of the qualities of a good judge, 
 it may be doubted whether legal history will 
 put him among the great Lord Chief Justices. 
 He made no law, few of his judgments are 
 likely to be remembered, and at times, for all
 
 70 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 his patience and dignity, he has seemed to 
 sit as uneasily on the Judicial Bench as on an 
 office stool. The truth is that he is not a man 
 of science, but a man of affairs. Law to him 
 was a fulcrum of affairs, and though his time 
 had to, his mind never willingly consented to 
 wear its fetters. 
 
 To some the spectacle of a man winning 
 reputation and high place in the profession of 
 law and historical fame in other directions is 
 in the nature of an annoying paradox. But 
 there are some minds which cannot be bound 
 even by a profession so exacting and jealous as 
 the law, and Lord Reading's is one of them. 
 Napoleon was a great winner of battles, but 
 he was a statesman with an interest in military 
 affairs rather than a soldier in the narrow 
 professional sense. Similarly, Lord Reading 
 was a great winner of battles in the Courts, but 
 not a lawyer contained and bounded by his 
 profession. The great things in his life are 
 not his conduct of celebrated cases in the 
 Courts, but his advice on finance at the begin- 
 ing of the war, his embassies to the United 
 States, and (one adds it confidently, though it 
 is still in the future) his tenure of the Vice- 
 royalty of India. 
 
 It is usual to attribute both his success in 
 commercial cases at the Bar and his mastery of
 
 LORD READING 71 
 
 finance to his experience of commerce before he 
 went to the Bar, but this, after all, was too short 
 to have given him much more than a nodding 
 acquaintance with some of its technicalities. 
 It is one of the foibles of business men that 
 they never attribute any knowledge or com- 
 mand of their affairs by an outsider to the 
 pure qualities of mind, but always to the 
 wrinkles of practical experience, and attention 
 has been concentrated on the few years in 
 which Lord Reading was engaged not over- 
 successfully in business to the neglect of certain 
 commanding qualities of mind which have given 
 him his real distinction. He is, in fact, one of 
 the great intellectuals of our time none the 
 less an intellectual because his mind has had 
 its exercise not in books, but in affairs. 
 
 Every successful lawyer has in a greater or 
 less degree the gift of singling out the essential 
 fact or idea from a mass of details and the 
 power of concentrating on that. Lord Reading 
 has in addition the gift of generalisation, which 
 has always been one of the distinctive gifts of 
 the Jewish race, enabling him to reduce great 
 masses of fact to order and discipline, the same 
 racial instinct for a big simple idea, and 
 immense logical courage. These are formid- 
 able gifts ; and when they are combined (as 
 they are in his case) with the patience which
 
 72 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 notoriously is not characteristic of the Jewish 
 race, with humility in the acquisition of know- 
 ledge, and with a singular simplicity and 
 charm of manner, they are quite irresistible gifts. 
 It is now generally known that the financial 
 policy that saved the country from economic 
 breakdown at the beginning of the war was 
 Lord Reading's. It was not that he alone had 
 the knowledge which others lacked, but that 
 he alone had the courage to insist that his intel- 
 lectual conviction of what was necessary to 
 prevent a financial crash should be expressed 
 in action. Of all the acts of courage done in 
 the war, the arrangement by which the State, 
 after the moratorium had been proclaimed, 
 agreed to ensure the payment of bills of 
 exchange was perhaps the most remarkable. 
 The liability ran into hundreds of millions ; 
 the actual loss was a few thousands at most. 
 This was Lord Reading's doing, and as a 
 supreme example of intellectual courage it is 
 sufficient in itself to ensure him a niche in the 
 fame of the war. At the Bar, when Lord 
 Reading was convinced that a client was 
 wrong, he would advise a settlement with the 
 same confidence whether the amount at stake 
 were a few shillings or hundreds of thousands 
 of pounds. Here was an example of the same 
 splendid courage writ large in national history.
 
 LORD READING 73 
 
 In purely party politics Lord Reading was 
 
 a child, and he was not successful in the House. 
 
 It was almost pathetic to contrast the innocence 
 
 with which he would note up the briefs of 
 
 party prejudice and controversy, and the 
 
 mastery with which he would handle specific 
 
 problems of affairs, whether in his legal or his 
 
 political work. He was always a genuine and 
 
 sincere Liberal, and his best speeches were 
 
 those made on some simple general principle 
 
 of politics, not those in which he was speaking 
 
 from a party brief. But though he was a 
 
 comparative failure on the political platform, 
 
 in private conference his faculty for plucking 
 
 the heart out of a subject, his suavity, and his 
 
 unruffled coolness made him invaluable. It 
 
 was to these gifts that his missions to America 
 
 owed their great success. No one did more 
 
 for Anglo-American friendship in the war, and 
 
 no one has developed more effectively the old 
 
 theme of the common law which they share as 
 
 a bond of union between the two countries. 
 
 The Bible and Blackstone on this rock shall 
 
 they build who work for enduring projects of 
 
 friendship between England and America. 
 
 This vision in finance, and diplomatic skill 
 in adjusting the details of financial and com- 
 mercial co-operation, take us far from the 
 ordinary ideas of the lawyer. The next step
 
 74 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 in Lord Reading's career, the Viceroy alty of 
 India, takes us farther away still. But the 
 conception of law as a science which dries up 
 the marrow and of its practice as the fashioning 
 of thorny verbal bouquets is, after all, mere 
 vulgar prejudice. There is a type of lawyer for 
 whom law is a science, and its practice like a 
 musty monastic penance. But there is another 
 type to whom it is an instrument of political 
 liberty, as it was to Coke and the great 
 common lawyers of Stuart days, a mould into 
 which our glowing aspirations are run to cool 
 and harden. To this second type Lord Read- 
 ing belongs, and his distinction is a refutation 
 of the common fallacy that a man cannot have 
 both a legal and a practical constructive mind. 
 It is odd that though England, which owes 
 so much of its liberties to lawyers, should be in 
 danger of forgetting the debt, India should 
 have fallen in love with the prospect of a 
 lawyer- Viceroy. Doubtless with the vast 
 majority of the Indians who have hailed his 
 appointment, the justice that is in his title is 
 his chief attraction, for the man himself and 
 his qualities are unknown to them. But some 
 there are who know the great part that the 
 common law has played in English history in 
 curbing the tyranny of the Executive, and 
 Lord Reading, as several of his speeches have
 
 LORD READING 75 
 
 shown, goes out to India with a passionate 
 faith in law as the great weapon of constitu- 
 tional progress. It is a great experiment, this 
 mission of Lord Reading's to the East, and 
 none the less romantic because its ideals are 
 clothed in the quiet sober garments of the law. 
 If it succeeds and the omens are favourable 
 we may break down part of that barrier which 
 separates the law and the Executive, and a new 
 class of administrators may arise whose experi- 
 ence has been gained in the hard school of the 
 law. The convention which prescribes a 
 judicial cloister as the sanctified close of a 
 life of legal success appeals to some minds, 
 but not to all, and Lord Reading has done 
 much to break it down.
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE
 
 V 
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE has been in 
 politics for thirty years, and for 
 nearly fifteen of them has straddled 
 right across the path, so that no one has been 
 able to get past him either way. There is no 
 career in English politics equal to his in 
 variety and acuteness of interest, none so 
 baffling to a fair judgment, and certainly none 
 that has had so magnificent a stage-setting. In 
 one act the Empire is in danger, in a second 
 the British Constitution, and in a third the 
 whole world rocks almost to its fall ; twice the 
 millennium expensively dawns ; and there are 
 numerous transformation scenes, with one still 
 to come. Nor has human nature's need of 
 refreshment between the acts been entirely 
 overlooked by the management. And through- 
 out it is the personality of Mr. Lloyd George, 
 at times heroic in its proportions, at other 
 times more like Puck, that lends unity to 
 the whole drama. Except him, every other 
 character who was in at the beginning 
 
 79
 
 80 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 is either killed, moribund, or pensioned. 
 Stupor mundi, he alone remains, and with more 
 right to the title than Barbarossa's grandson 
 ever had. 
 
 But he is a Colossus with two strides, not 
 one ; and each must be considered separately. 
 On the first stride, history will pronounce him 
 the Welshman who failed to reverse the Norman 
 conquest. On the second, he bestrides not 
 only England, but the world, but one foot is 
 still in suspense, and so is the judgment of 
 history. Unwillingly, an estimate must pay 
 some attention to chronology. 
 
 L 1892-1910 
 
 He began as Owen-Glendower in a bowler, 
 bent on reversing old defeats and on winning 
 Home Rule for his beloved Wales, then flushed 
 with a decent Sinn Fein which made of every 
 I chapel a miniature city-state, each with its 
 ,/ little Pericles and Euripides, inglorious but 
 rarely mute. The chapel was his secondary 
 school, his uncle, David Lloyd, his noblest 
 teacher and friend. Foiled after five years in 
 Parliament in his early ambition to create an 
 Independent Nationalist Party for all Wales 
 with himself as its Parnell, he invaded English 
 politics proper, and most people date at this 
 time the end of his Welsh period. On the
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 81 
 
 contrary, it lasted at any rate until 1910. 
 During most of these years he was making 
 what boys used to call " transfers " of the 
 Welsh world and its philosophy on to English 
 politics. With him, provinciality was not (as 
 with too many) something to be brushed off, 
 like dust from the boots, but a conqueror's 
 emblem, a bladder to support him on the sea 
 of glory. His agitation against the Boer War 
 reflected the country-bred man's dislike of 
 industrialism and of the power of the purse in 
 politics (a sentiment visible also in the country 
 towns of England at this time), and was the 
 passionate protest from a small nation against 
 overwhelming physical odds, not the expression 
 of any theory about Imperial questions. Wise 
 or not, it did him honour, and he has never 
 since been quite so happy as in these martyr 
 days. It did him service, too, for it earned 
 him a reputation for courage to which he has 
 not always lived up, made him leader of the 
 left wing of the Liberal Party, and gave him 
 that uncanny insight into military realities 
 which he was later to turn to such great 
 national use. 
 
 To Wales again and its innocence of the 
 
 self-sufficiency of bureaucracy must be ascribed 
 
 his success in his first office as President of 
 
 the Board of Trade. He actually consulted 
 
 6
 
 82 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 business men and workpeople in preparing 
 legislation that affected them, and it was now 
 that the world discovered that the enthusiast, 
 so far from being an extremist, was an arch- 
 accommodator. Welsh temperament again, 
 and the surroundings of his youth, set the key 
 in the revivalist fervour of his campaign of 
 social reform as Chancellor ; but though he now 
 became famous, his Chancellorship was the 
 least successful period of his life. Always a 
 man of humanity and genuine democratic 
 instinct, his early attitude towards the land 
 and the landed classes was Welsh rather than 
 English, and though natural and modern 
 enough to the Welsh farmer-nationalist exas- 
 perated by the tyranny of an alien or Angli- 
 cising aristocracy, it was obsolescent here, or 
 would have been but for the folly of his 
 opponents' tactics. Yet it is characteristic of 
 the man that in the middle of all this bitter 
 controversy he was the one on the Liberal side 
 in the famous conferences of 1910 who was 
 willing to carry compromise farthest. As 
 great a generator of steam as Gladstone, he 
 could cool and condense his own steam as well 
 as Disraeli himself. 
 
 When he first, as a very young man, saw the 
 House of Commons, he confessed to his diary 
 that he felt like William eyeing England on his
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 83 
 
 visit to Edward the Confessor. He did not 
 keep a diary in his Chancellor days, or he 
 might have compared himself to Arthur come 
 back with Excalibur to drive out the Normans ; 
 certainly, if there was no Celtic reconquest of 
 England, it was no fault of the Tories, who 
 fought like Harold, with equal valour and 
 stupidity. But there was one distinctively 
 English influence on his politics at this time 
 that of Chamberlain. The Whiggish end of 
 Liberalism had no interest for him as a Welsh- 
 man, and always, from a boy onwards, he 
 inclined to Chamberlain and the Radicals. 
 Their views on Home Rule were barely dis- 
 tinguishable ; they both had an advanced 
 social policy and curled their lips when they 
 talked of dukes ; both, apart from this conces- 
 sion to Radical convention, were realists in 
 temperament. It was an accident that he did 
 not leave Gladstone when Chamberlain did ; it 
 was not an accident, but deliberate policy, that 
 set him to do all the things that Chamberlain 
 might have done if he had not gone over, or if, 
 later, Balfour had let him leave the Conserva- 
 tives and start a new party of his own. They 
 had different objectives, but with both the key 
 to progress was fiscal reform ; and though, with 
 the one, this meant taxation through the 
 Customs and, with the other, taxation through
 
 84 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 the Excise, there was otherwise not much 
 between them. For Lloyd George was no 
 more a Free-trader by conviction than he was 
 a Protectionist. Political theories and half the 
 so-called principles of party were to him only 
 the fossils of history, which men in spectacles 
 might tap with their hammers, but were not 
 to be allowed to interfere with the romantic 
 enjoyment of the scenery. It was like the man 
 that he should have been dissatisfied even with 
 the cataclysmic Liberal victory in the elections 
 of 1906, and should have insisted that rival 
 social legislation based on a rival fiscal reform 
 was necessary to make good the ground won. 
 These were the subjects he was really interested 
 in ; on such matters as naval armaments and 
 our relations with Germany he took a strong 
 line, but did not think for himself. He adopted 
 the handiest views from his Liberal associates, 
 usually from the naval economists, because he 
 wanted the money to finance his own policy, 
 but on occasion, as in the celebrated speech in 
 1911, from Sir Edward Grey. The war brought 
 no solution in the continuity of his political 
 development. It only changed the conditions. 
 
 II. 1910-1918 
 
 To what did Lloyd George owe his power ? 
 Not to electoral infallibility, for by no means
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 85 
 
 all his political campaigns were successful. 
 His early Welsh Home Rule scheme ran 
 aground on the fact that there are two Waleses 
 as there are two Irelands ; and after the first 
 election in 1910, he rightly regarded the finance 
 of his social policy as beaten and was only too 
 glad that the Lords had presented him with the 
 constitutional issue. Not to his oratory, for, 
 despite some war speeches of lyrical perfection, 
 and some admirable recent examples of lucid 
 exposition, he is not in the apostolic succession 
 of English oratory. An incomparable actor, a 
 spell-binder, a perfect conductor of electrical 
 discharge, a crowd-compeller and master of 
 mass-psychology, but not a builder of stately 
 argument nor a sculptor in words of ideals of 
 such mental and moral beauty that all who 
 hear must forsake everything else and follow 
 them. Nor to intellectual equipment, though 
 this was much greater than is commonly 
 supposed. The whole world was Mr. Lloyd 
 George's school, and he never ceased learning ; 
 but he suffered from the lack of the early 
 mental discipline, without which a man rarely 
 attains the great virtue of intellectual patience. 
 Mr. Lloyd George has the quickest mind in 
 politics, but it is impatient of detail, incapable 
 of avoiding a short cut, and prone to the 
 skimble-skamble when he is not interested.
 
 86 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 He trips over his own nimbleness. And as he 
 grew older, his respect for the expert, for 
 storied learning, and for the artistry and 
 craftsmanship of life grew less and less, his 
 faith in extemporisation, in power of " rigging " 
 and ** fixing up " anything grew more and 
 more. He is one of the few Englishmen 
 who believed that machinery in politics, as in 
 industry, is only made to be scrapped. 
 
 Nor, again, did he make his way by the sheer 
 force of character like that moral Behemoth, 
 Gladstone. 
 
 He is very human, amiably so as a rule, but 
 not always. He draws his refreshing drink 
 from springs that are pure, but the wells of 
 politics are situate in muddy and trampled 
 fields, and some of his people often have 
 noticeably dirty boots. He avoids Gladstone's 
 mistake of leaving human nature out of 
 account, but tactics, at any rate since his 
 rupture with the official Liberals, have had too 
 great an influence on his policy. He is Welsh 
 in his desire to please, and in his power to put 
 himself at another's point of view, and for 
 that reason he will both talk down to a very 
 low common measure of intelligence in a crowd, 
 and talk up to the views of one who is seeing 
 him privately, and this last will often go away 
 leaping for joy to have found his spiritual
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 87 
 
 affinity, whereas before he is many yards 
 away Mr. Lloyd George may be exhibiting the 
 same power of charm and understanding to 
 one who holds exactly the opposite views. 
 Some call it duplicity ; rather is it the 
 vacillation of the water-diviner's rod. In 
 public and private utterances he exhibits the 
 same combination of simplicity and subtlety 
 simplicity in the general aim and proposition, 
 subtlety in the choice of the particular instances 
 and of the means for the fulfilment of his 
 desire. Neither social rank nor reputation 
 makes any difference to his estimate of a man, 
 and he always judges for himself. Flouting 
 the conventions, but extremely sensitive to 
 criticism ; despising the forms and ceremonies 
 of high place, but a lover of power who can 
 at times be Napoleonic in his decisions ; his 
 genius for understanding others has often, 
 by raising false hopes, encouraged misunder- 
 standing of himself. He is as often the victim 
 of his own charm as the exploiter of it. 
 
 No, the distinctive gift, which has made him 
 the greatest natural genius for politics in our 
 history, is his realistic unveiling vision, which 
 
 enables him to see parties and situations, as it 
 
 i 
 
 were, in cross-section, to observe the Tory 
 subsoil in which the giants of the Liberal forest | 
 have their roots, and to detect the Radical
 
 88 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 inside in pillars of the Tory faith. This power 
 of seeing unity in differences and differences in 
 unity constitutes his wizardry in conference. 
 He is at once an explosive of party union and a 
 builder of flying bridges between incompatibles. 
 In fact, he is a born coalitionist. 
 
 As long ago as 1910 he had the idea of 
 coalition. Why not ? He was on the modern 
 side and had no reverence for the classic 
 traditions of party ; as a young Welshman, he 
 cared nothing for either except in so far as it 
 could serve Wales. And when he became 
 naturalised in English politics he retained this 
 very wholesome view of party as a servant, not 
 a master ; as a realist, he knew that the 
 hideous masks and stinkpots of party con- 
 troversies, which he himself used with such 
 effect, had little to do with facts, and still less 
 with conviction or efficiency. In 1910, this 
 keen rationalism was in advance of the times, 
 but the war made coalition not only possible 
 but necessary, and luckily it brought Mr. Lloyd 
 George to the head of affairs. There has been 
 a vast amount of controversy on whether he 
 was or was not personally loyal to Mr. Asquith 
 in 1915 and at the end of 1916. But, if it is 
 agreed (and it generally is) that to win the 
 war it was necessary that Mr. Asquith should 
 go and Mr. Lloyd George succeed him, personal
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 89 
 
 loyalty might have been indulged to the 
 extent of becoming public vice, and there is 
 no question save whether the substitution was 
 done decently. It was. 
 
 It would be almost impossible to praise Mr. 
 Lloyd George's qualities as a war Prime 
 Minister too highly. It brought out the pure 
 gold of his genius, as those who knew him in 
 1900 might have predicted that it would. His 
 realism in war was like a gift from heaven. 
 He had more strategy in his little finger than 
 the average general in his whole body ; he 
 was the first to discover that industry at home 
 was the army at the base, and to act upon his 
 discovery ; and (except, perhaps, for a few 
 moments in 1917) he never lost faith in our 
 victory, and inspired others with his faith and 
 with his works. These things should not be 
 forgotten, nor shall we be allowed to forget 
 them. What is much more easily forgotten is 
 that these war virtues are the same qualities 
 that we disliked or admired (according to fancy) 
 in Mr. Lloyd George before the war. 
 
 What, then, makes the difference between 
 their efficacy in war and their comparative 
 inefncacy before and since ? Inefncacy before, 
 for apart from the Insurance Act (passed after 
 1910), how much pure spirit remains from the 
 distillations of those social reform days, and
 
 90 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 who knows whether Mr. Lloyd George is not 
 the severest critic of his controversial methods 
 in that period, and how far his affection for 
 Coalition is not the repentance of the morn- 
 ing's headaches ? Inefficacy after, for at the 
 highest valuation of the work of the Coalition, 
 it is obviously in its present shape not a 
 permanent instrument either of union or pro- 
 gress. There are those who explain everything 
 that they do not understand in affairs by the 
 theory of some deflation of moral earnestness. 
 It will not do in this case, for Mr. Lloyd George 
 now works harder than ever, and no man has 
 ever been so faithful to his upbringing as he 
 to Llanystumdwy. 
 
 The explanation is that Mr. Lloyd George 
 neither is nor was Liberal or Conservative, but 
 is now as before the typical Radical. 1 In 
 ordinary times the Radical stands midway 
 between the parties, having points of contact 
 with both, but belonging to neither. Usually, 
 though not always, he works with the Liberals, 
 but often he goes over to the Conservative 
 Party. It was a Radical Disraeli who rescued 
 the old Tory Party from utter ruin, and con- 
 verted it into the Conservative Party ; it was 
 another Radical Chamberlain who, after the 
 Home Rule split, made a new school of British 
 
 1 See the observations on the use of this term on p. 127.
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 91 
 
 Imperialism and Protection, and was for a 
 time the dominating influence in the Tory 
 Party counsels ; it was a third Radical, Lloyd 
 George, who contributed the driving force to 
 the Liberal Party in 1906 and succeeding 
 years, but who has not yet gone over to the 
 Conservative Party. His success during the 
 war was due to the fact that war superseded 
 party distinctions, and produced in the minds 
 of most Englishmen just that indifference to 
 party names to which Mr. Lloyd George was 
 born. He was able in the war to stand as his 
 own Radical self, the first Radical in our 9 
 history who ever done so in high place. Before 
 the war he failed partly because of his own im- 
 maturity, partly because he was not in his own 
 camp. Nor has he been in his own camp since 
 the war. Perhaps the chief obstacle to an 
 understanding of his political character is the 
 idea, very prevalent amongst Liberals, that 
 the war made him a pervert and extinguished 
 his reformer's fires. He would not have been 
 human if the war had left him unchanged, 
 but the real cleavage of his life came in 1910, 
 not in 1914. In 1910, so far from being at the 
 pinnacle of his career, he was perilously near 
 to failure, and it was then that he discovered 
 that the frontal attack was not the last word 
 in political wisdom. It was he who made the
 
 92 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 suggestion to the new King which led to the 
 constitutional conference, and at that confer- 
 ence he discovered how much he had in 
 common with the men of other parties. From 
 that moment he was a Coalitionist. " Men 
 quarrel too much," he has been heard to say. 
 " They become slaves to words and phrases. 
 They miss the reality." Oh, words of wisdom. 
 For Lloyd George, the Radical, has points 
 of contact with both Liberal and Conservative 
 Parties ; so has every other Radical. It is a 
 toss-up whether the Radical goes one way or 
 the other a toss-up from the Radical's point 
 of view a tragedy when one thinks how 
 different the history of the country might have 
 been if Gladstone had not shed Chamberlain, 
 and Asquith had not been seduced into 
 conflict with Lloyd George. And yet even the 
 most successful revolting Radical, too, has his 
 sorrows. At a time of life when monogamic 
 bliss yields the solid blessings, he finds himself 
 distracted amid a seraglio of affinities. 
 
 III. 1918-21 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George vigorously resisted the 
 policy which led to the war, and but for the 
 German invasion of Belgium, he would have 
 left the Government along with Lord Morley 
 and Mr. John Burns. But, once in the war,
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 93 
 
 he showed himself the true Radical in allowing 
 no party principles or prejudices to stand 
 between the country and victory. As the war 
 approached its end and the end came very 
 suddenly he had to consider what his future 
 political allegiance should be, and it was 
 natural that he should decide to continue the 
 Coalition. The single command and the single 
 front which was, perhaps, his greatest con- 
 tribution to victory, the suggestions for com- 
 promise between the parties at the Conference 
 of 1910, and the idea of coalition on a single 
 domestic front to solve the problems of peace 
 have we not here the same logical idea through- 
 out, varying only in its application ? And here 
 is the real, the mature Lloyd George. He could 
 not have decided differently than he did, but, 
 in fact, the decision was taken out of his hands. 
 For it has been said and has not been contra- 
 dicted that the election of 1918 was originally 
 designed to ask for a mandate to finish the war, 
 which was expected to last till 1919, and, the 
 war finishing earlier than was expected, it had 
 hurriedly to be adapted to the purposes of peace. 
 It was a terribly difficult task that awaited 
 him at the conclusion of hostilities, and the 
 extravagant expectations of peace that four 
 years' war had produced in men's minds, 
 and too sanguine and ill-considered election
 
 94 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 promises, made complete success in his task 
 impossible of achievement. A whole world of 
 foreign policy lay in ruins and had to be 
 reconstructed afresh ; two flatly opposing 
 conceptions of peace the French and the 
 American had to be reconciled with each 
 other and with our own. It was so long since 
 any attention had been given to the finance of 
 international trade that its few simple laws had 
 been forgotten. On the top of all that, the old 
 party landmarks had been obliterated and 
 needed to be marked out afresh. The intoler- 
 ance of the straight- jacket of party, the 
 realist's impatience with the hollow phrases of 
 party controversy, the ambition to state the 
 problems of national life in new and truer 
 forms these had been the notes of Mr. Lloyd 
 George's political life, and people had high 
 hopes of what he might accomplish. To 
 endow our politics with these qualities 
 would be an even greater achievement than 
 victory in the war, and (men thought) would 
 make the natural climax of his tortuous but 
 not inconsistent political life. Had Mr. Lloyd 
 George accomplished a tithe of the popular 
 hopes of peace, he would have been the greatest 
 man of all time. Yet he might have done 
 more had he realised his own power and 
 indulged his genius more confidently. He was
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 95 
 
 the one man in our history, and 1918 the one 
 year in which he was free to form a Coalition 
 after his own heart. The idea of coalition was 
 right, for without coalition there can be no prac- 
 tical politics now. Mr. Lloyd George, in 1910, 
 saw even farther into the future than he knew. 
 Nor is it that this coalition has not done 
 things that neither Liberal nor Conserva- 
 tive Party could possibly have done singly 
 with the other in Opposition. Let all these 
 things be conceded with full measure. What, 
 then, has gone wrong ? The mistake was that 
 the Coalition was formed on too wide a basis. 
 Coalition, if it is to be more than a stop-gap 
 until a crisis is passed, must at any rate be an 
 organic unity, drawn from men of several 
 parties, but with a common philosophy of 
 politics or, at any rate, united by something 
 more than a willingness to sit on the same 
 benches. But this Coalition, as Mr. Lloyd 
 George said of the Allies after the Rapallo 
 Conference, is not a unity, but a mere stitching 
 together of half a dozen interests and sets of 
 ideas the old bureaucracy represented by Mr. 
 Austen Chamberlain ; the new bureaucracy 
 (child born out of wedlock of social policy and 
 the war) represented by Sir Eric Geddes and 
 Dr. Addison ; the progressive realists by Sir 
 Robert Home and a group of young Coalition-
 
 96 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 ists ; the Conservative idealists by the back- 
 bench Cecilians ; the merely stupid interests 
 and the merely sharp ; and the two machines, 
 of which the one that is supposed to be 
 in efficient working order is becoming every 
 day less Coalitionist and more Tory. And the 
 sole bond of unity that holds these elements 
 together is Mr. Lloyd George, without a capable 
 lieutenant of his own school, with the excep- 
 tion of Sir Robert Home, for Sir Gordon 
 Hewart speaks a different idiom, and Mr. 
 Churchill is not so much a member of the 
 Government as an independent principality. 
 No wonder the seams began to start. The 
 clear-cut decisions for which Mr. Lloyd George 
 was famous became for sometime so blurred 
 that they were unrecognisable. His Russian 
 policy was a shrewd divination of the popular 
 mind and of historical reality ; and it might, 
 had it been pursued consistently from the 
 first, have had all the measure of success that 
 usually rewards fidelity to a clear logical idea. 
 But it was so presented, owing to the necessity 
 of carrying at any rate the nominal assent of 
 his colleagues, that its enemies hated it the 
 more for its disguise, its friends could not 
 recognise it for its disguise, and anyhow it 
 came cold to the table. So with the Govern- 
 ment's Irish policy, which until recently was a
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 97 
 
 bad mixture of political shrewdness with 
 incompetence and malice in administration, 
 like the sea god Glaucus (to adapt the Platonic 
 simile), whose original image can hardly be 
 discerned because his natural members are 
 broken and crushed and damaged by the 
 waves, and incrustations have grown over 
 them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that 
 he is more like some monster than he is to his 
 natural form. And so in many, though not 
 all, departments of policy, not because the 
 Government is a Coalition, but because the 
 Coalition is what it is, a compendium of most 
 parties past and present, not the party of the 
 future and men's hope. And the absence of 
 unity in the meantime exaggerates the political 
 vices to which Mr. Lloyd George is prone. His 
 gift of accommodation degenerates into ambi- 
 guity, his originality into a fitful tyranny and 
 a system of personal rule. He is a hawk that 
 can no longer swoop, but must nutter like a 
 bat amongst the Tory rafters. 
 
 How has so great a master of political 
 tactics brought himself to this pass ? Partly 
 because of the conditions under which the 1918 
 election was held. Partly because Mr. Lloyd 
 George has had so much work that he has had 
 little time to think. Partly lack of courage or 
 exaggerated respect for the machinery of 
 7
 
 98 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 party. But the main cause was that the 
 Coalition was too broad, too comprehensive. 
 He believed rightly in a combination of parties ; 
 but he opened the door so wide that he ad- 
 mitted those whose lack of sympathy destroyed 
 the unity of the Coalition, aroused the slum- 
 bering spirit of faction, and in the resultant 
 vacillation reflected discredit on the leader. 
 For the churches have done their work much 
 better than the schools, and ^in sheer inability 
 to understand intellectual problems that might 
 well baffle genius and learning, men fall back 
 on their restatement in moral terms' which 
 they can understand, and think they can 
 resolve. Thus every baffling political quad- 
 ratic instantly becomes with these critics a 
 simple issue of right and wrong ; every surd 
 in diplomatic algebra is a proof of a moral 
 twist ; every partial solution of a world-wide 
 problem is sure sign of depravity. Mr. Lloyd 
 George has suffered from this facile moralistic 
 criticism. If one-half the energy devoted to 
 moral denunciation had been given to intel- 
 lectual appreciation of his difficulties, the prob- 
 lems might by now have been nearer solution. 
 The Radical-minded man who aspires to 
 unite factions for national ends has many pit- 
 falls. One is Caesarism (for the great Julius 
 himself was a Radical, and as a sympathiser
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 99 
 
 with the revolutionary Communism of 
 Catiline, the founder of the Roman Empire 
 had a past far more lurid than the land-tax 
 period of Mr. Lloyd George). This danger took 
 with Mr. Lloyd George the exceedingly mild 
 form of looking over Lord Curzon's shoulder 
 at the Foreign Office, and appointing a 
 Minister of Transport. A second pitfall is 
 Conservatism, for Conservatism welcomes 
 Radicals because it thinks from past experience 
 that it can transform them into its own. Here 
 Mr. Lloyd George is in danger, but so far he 
 has avoided the fate of his predecessors, Disraeli 
 and Chamberlain, and he, not they, has so far 
 done most of the transforming. A third pitfall 
 is ambiguity, which compromises both sides, 
 and here Mr. Lloyd George has certainly 
 not escaped reproach. But the test is in 
 the end, and the end is not yet. Dublin 
 and Washington may yet be his salvation 
 
 Via prima salutis 
 Quod minime reris, Graia pandetur ab urbe. 
 
 Any policy would have drawn converging fire of 
 attack ; and open order and mobile manoeuvring 
 may have been the only way to reduce casualties. 
 But as time goes on and time is of the 
 essence in the politics of Coalition the need 
 for concentration which sheds irreconcilable 
 elements becomes more urgent.
 
 100 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Ever since the Coalition was formed, well- 
 meaning people have been offering directions 
 to him, but the wise voices were those that 
 called " Left," " Left," for, contrary to what 
 Mr. Lloyd George himself imagined two years 
 ago, the immediate future is not with Labour 
 nor with Toryism, but with some form of 
 Liberalism. He is now like a man riding two 
 horses that are straining apart. His future, 
 clearly, is in a combination of progressive 
 Conservatism and Liberalism with the right 
 wing of Labour. As a Conservative Prime 
 Minister, he would be naught. An orthodox 
 Liberal he never has been nor will be. Labour 
 is still too unformed and inchoate in its views 
 to attract a leader from without. There are 
 those who have suggested that the wisest 
 course may be for the Prime Minister to rest 
 awhile from labours whose continuous strain 
 has been almost greater than human endur- 
 ance, in the expectation of returning refreshed 
 with new ideas and strength. One does not 
 see Mr. Lloyd George following that advice. 
 But the alternative is a movement to the left, 
 if not this year, then not later than next. 
 Certain it is that, unless he escapes from the toils 
 of pure Tory Party faction that are gathering 
 round him, he will for the rest of his days be a 
 blind Samson in the house of the Philistines.
 
 LORD CURZON
 
 LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTON. 
 
 [Elliott & Fry .
 
 VI 
 LORD CURZON 
 
 THERE is no aristocracy left but ours 
 capable of throwing up men like Lord 
 Curzon, who assume rule over others 
 like a cross of duty, and practise the duty like 
 a vice. He is an extreme case even in his own 
 class. Love of power for gain, or for the 
 sake of some idea with which one is bursting, 
 or to impress one's neighbours, is common 
 enough, but these were not his motives. 
 
 44 1 have only five years," he said when he 
 became Viceroy of India. " For such a task 
 every year seems a minute, every minute a 
 second ; one might almost say that there is 
 hardly time to begin." Here is love of power 
 for its own sake, perhaps, but no vulgar lust ; 
 rather, a passion of service that is almost 
 a religion, a passion the more remarkable 
 because he is by nature cold, neither has he 
 any single overmastering idea of his own 
 which he desires to impose. It is the ardour 
 of a medieval prelate interpreting the ways of 
 the immortals to men, magnificently ascetic, 
 
 103
 
 104 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 haughtily humble. For, haughty vicegerent 
 as he was, Lord Curzon was deeply humble 
 before the ideal of the pax Britannica in Asia 
 which he served. The nobility that obliges a 
 man to wander over all Asia, to study deep, 
 and to work twice as hard as any of his assis- 
 tants is something that the British aristocracy 
 may well be proud of. 
 
 It is said to have been some glowing words 
 of Sir James FitzJames Stephen heard at Eton 
 that kindled the enthusiasm of Lord Curzon 
 for Asia. Certainly it possessed him early and 
 never left him. There is a ridiculous story 
 about how certain people belonging to different 
 nations set about writing a treatise on the 
 elephant. The Russian shut himself up in a 
 room with a million cigarettes, and at the 
 end of a year produced a book entitled The 
 Elephant : Does he Exist ? The Pole inter- 
 viewed all the chancelleries and newspaper 
 offices in Europe and finally produced a massive 
 tome on the Elephant and the Polish Question. 
 The Frenchman published a charming book 
 on VElephant et ses Amours. But the English- 
 man went to where elephants live wild, and 
 finally produced a bashful ten-page brochure 
 of Hints on the Methods of Capturing Elephants. 
 Except in his lack of bashfulness, Lord Curzon 
 was true to type. His enthusiasm for the East
 
 LORD CURZON 105 
 
 took the characteristically English form of 
 determining to see and learn everything about 
 it for himself. He climbed the Pamirs, visited 
 the Court of Afghanistan, wandered in Persia, 
 and wrote a great book about it which has 
 every quality but charm, studied Russian 
 methods in Central Asia, French in Cochin- 
 China, and the Japanese at home, and came 
 back to English politics with a fervent belief 
 in the sacredness and grandeur of the British 
 mission in Asia. Some travellers Sir Mark 
 Sykes, for example when they go to Asia 
 fall in love with one of its ancient civilisations, 
 and return with a burning desire to restore it ; 
 others, such as Burton and Lawrence, dye 
 their whole minds in the gorgeous romance of 
 the East ; others, like Kinglake of " Eothen," 
 love the East with their eyes, never with their 
 minds. But Lord Curzon travelled the East 
 like a naturalist in politics, and returned with 
 an unrivalled collection of specimens illus- 
 trating the science of government, each tribe 
 and place duly desiccated and transfixed with 
 a pin awaiting the benevolent study of the 
 British Raj. 
 
 He went to the Foreign Office under Lord 
 Salisbury, for whom he had a great reverence, 
 and was an efficient and highly unpopular 
 Parliamentary Under-Secretary. But the
 
 106 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Foreign Office was only a waiting-room for him. 
 He had every qualification that knowledge 
 and study could give him for the highest post 
 in Asia ; character, too, enormous industry, 
 and an intellectual conscientiousness as sensi- 
 tive to a mistake as to a scandal. Above all, 
 he had the loftiest ideal of Imperial duty. He 
 became Viceroy of India at thirty-nine, and 
 the country was proud to send a Viceroy with 
 so many qualifications. At last an expert was 
 called to government. Wonderful ! 
 
 There was not a department of Indian 
 Government in which the new Viceroy did not 
 make his influence felt. He arrived after an 
 unfortunate frontier war in which more British 
 troops had been engaged than ever fought under 
 Wellington, and he made a settlement of the 
 frontier problem that disappointed the forward 
 school, and therein showed its wisdom ; he 
 screwed up the efficiency of the Civil Service 
 by his celebrated order cutting down the 
 length and the frequency of written reports ; 
 he recognised merit and obscure hard work ; 
 he insisted on equal justice between Indians 
 and Europeans rex Jupiter omnibus idem. 
 There is no end to the catalogue of good and 
 useful things that he did. Even the partition 
 of Bengal, which made him so unpopular, 
 was inspired by very good reasons, and
 
 LORD CURZON 107 
 
 should have made for greater administrative 
 efficiency. 
 
 And yet when all is said the Viceroyalty was 
 the end of an old epoch, and it was reserved for 
 others to begin the new. The very virtues of 
 his government threw into bolder relief the 
 discovery that even in the East the days were 
 gone by when any people will be content to let 
 any other play the part of an earthly provi- 
 dence to them. Campbell-Bannerman's saying 
 that most people preferred to be self-governed 
 rather than well-governed was not so violent a 
 paradox after all, and it holds applied with 
 reason- even in Asia. If it appears strange 
 that a man of Lord Curzon's ability should live 
 in Asia for years and read everything that 
 anyone had ever written about it, and still 
 escape a truth that another man spots between 
 a bite of muffin and a cup of tea, it is only one 
 of the proofs of the limitations of the expert 
 with which politics abound. How very 
 different the modern history of India might 
 have been if one-half the toil that he gave to 
 the improvement of the efficiency of English 
 Government in India had been given to pre- 
 paring the Indian people to govern themselves 1 
 
 No one went to India from England knowing 
 so much as Lord Curzon ; yet of the new 
 chapters in the British history of Asia, one was
 
 108 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 begun by a very Western Liberal, Lord Morley, 
 another by a doctrinaire Jew, yet another by 
 Mark Sykes and a handful of British officers, 
 a fourth, in Egypt, by Lord Milner, and yet a 
 fifth chapter, that in Palestine, by one of the 
 Cecil family. From Lord Curzon nothing new, 
 nothing of the future. Indian Imperialism, 
 in fact, ended with his Viceroyalty, or rather 
 would have done if some of it had not escaped 
 and run amok in Mesopotamia. For one thing, 
 the part of earthly providence is one that 
 demands limitless resources, which we have 
 not got ; for another, we now realise how 
 much finer and rarer a thing it is in politics to 
 make a nation that will govern itself. Much 
 the finest achievement of England abroad 
 has been the making of the self-governing 
 Dominions ; we are now attempting the more 
 difficult task of educating alien races to 
 commonwealth status. 
 
 In the home politics to which he returned 
 after his Viceroyalty, Lord Curzon' s judgments 
 are well meaning, but amateurish and shallow. 
 In the constitutional agitation over the Lords 
 he was indistinguishable from the ruck except 
 for the greater dignity of his phrasing, and he 
 adopted the Chamberlain view of our fiscal 
 policy and of our relations with the Dominions 
 without understanding the psychology of a
 
 LORD CURZON 109 
 
 working-man either here or in the Dominions. 
 When he took part in a North Country election, 
 he was caricatured sitting on the back of an 
 elephant coming down a narrow street and 
 scattering the plain citizens, and to this day he 
 has never quite got rid of the durbar manner. 
 He is heard at his best in the House of Lords, 
 but even that is liable at any moment to become 
 a gilded howdah swaying in time with his 
 stately tread. Or (to change the longitude of 
 the metaphor) the peers, when he speaks, are 
 made to experience the inconvenience of tenants 
 trying to hold conversation on foot with the 
 squire mounted on the back of a horse which 
 persists in turning in a circle. He is one 
 of the most exact speakers in politics ; he has 
 historical imagination, and conveys as few 
 others can do a sense of the material and moral 
 greatness of the British Empire ; he is audible, 
 too. But he is also the schoolmaster of the 
 House, and that not quite in the sense in which 
 the word was used of ancient Athens, but in 
 the less flattering sense of one who awards 
 marks and gives impositions. With the big 
 boys he gets on well enough ; but idealogues, 
 Liberals, seers of visions, and the whole brood 
 of intuitionists in politics are definitely in his 
 lower school. And in his relations with any 
 democracy, whether of voters or of Glasgow
 
 110 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 students, there will always supervene some 
 period of huffiness and injured dignity. 
 
 He succeeded Mr. Balfour at the Foreign 
 Office, but, as the real head of the Foreign 
 Office is the Prime Minister, Lord Curzon has 
 had very little chance to show his quality. 
 He has a reverence for an accomplished fact 
 even of the political hierarchy, and he is very 
 loyal to the fixed and settled policy of the 
 Government. But he initiates nothing, and 
 if he did, would probably be overruled, for he 
 is not in possession of the keys to the new 
 heaven. He is said to obstruct and to have 
 opposed the Egyptian scheme of Lord Milner, 
 and doubtless also the transfer of Egypt (if 
 this had been arranged) to the Colonial Office 
 along with the rest of the Middle East. But 
 his main duty at the Foreign Office is to give 
 precision and definiteness to sketchy outlines 
 of policy and dress the resultant figure in the 
 Foreign Office toga. This he does very well, 
 but there is not the making of a great Foreign 
 Office Secretary in it. Perhaps he would do 
 greater service as a critic than as an agent of 
 foreign policy. 
 
 In his matchless sense of form, in the perfect 
 command of the lingua franca that a classical 
 education teaches, in his learning and deep 
 respect for concrete fact, and in his sense of
 
 LORD CURZON 111 
 
 the greatness of our mission in the world no 
 less than in his definite political views, Lord 
 Curzon belongs to other times. He is a Whig 
 strayed from his fellows, hastening weary 
 but open-minded to catch up to his age and 
 never quite succeeding. He has no future in 
 this generation, but the next will probably 
 recognise in him the last representative of a 
 great order, and will be inclined to put him 
 much higher than this generation does.
 
 MR. ASQUITH
 
 MR. AND MRS. ASQUITH. 
 
 [P. P. A.
 
 VII 
 MR. ASQUITH 
 
 A SOUND Yorkshire stock gave him 
 health, his first marriage help, his 
 second fashion and society, but Oxford 
 made Mr. Asquith what he has been and still 
 is. Time has brought him no changes except 
 of political rank, and no real rise or fall, for 
 power is in the man himself, not in his office, 
 and, in a sense, Mr. Asquith has just as much 
 (and just as little) power now as when he was 
 Prime Minister. 
 
 There is an aristocracy of education as well 
 as of birth. Like all aristocracies, it is dis- 
 tracted by feuds, but each faction has its own 
 idiom of thought and expression, repeating 
 itself in its adherents like a Hapsburg nose or a 
 Cavendish jaw, a pride more intense than any 
 that birth knows, an imposing facade that it 
 turns towards the world and an interior that 
 it is fain to keep guarded against indiscretion. 
 Mr. Asquith belonged to the most famous of 
 these cliques the Balliol of Jowett, the saintly 
 worldling. So, too, did Lords Curzon, Grey, 
 
 115
 
 116 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 and Milner; but whereas they brought to 
 Oxford characters formed by other influences, 
 Asquith brought little but a sound constitu- 
 tion and a white sheet of paper ; and Balliol 
 wrote upon it nearly the whole man. 
 
 The Prime Minister of later years is the 
 former Balliol scholar, looking larger and feeling 
 smaller ; the speeches in which Mr. Asquith 
 knew so well how to express the mind of a 
 nation in stately and sonorous phrase are the 
 old Latin prose exercises retranslated into 
 English and furnished with modern instances ; 
 the working of democratic institutions is the 
 Oxford examination schools again with eccen- 
 tric examiners ; distortion and exaggeration 
 of political sentiment are howlers grown up, 
 more hateful than ever to the scholar, to whom 
 exactness, balance, avoidance of excess, are 
 the master intellectual virtues. Mr. Asquith 
 through life is always the prize scholar in 
 politics. 
 
 The scholar's honour, his justice of heart 
 and mind, and his proud shyness are great 
 possessions to carry through life, but they are 
 not a complete equipment for politics. He 
 needs an inner force to drive and create, or 
 some strong influence from without, if he is to 
 mould events. Scholarship tends to be barren, 
 or, if it has kittens, it usually eats them out of
 
 MR. ASQUITH 117 
 
 shyness. It makes minds like clocks, finished 
 pieces of mechanism, but useless till they are 
 wound up, and sometimes, perversely, it 
 forgets to provide a keyhole. These last are 
 the men some of them of unrivalled mental 
 attainments who are never afterwards heard 
 of. With Mr. Asquith politics was the key- 
 hole, but others did the winding first Glad- 
 stone, then Lord Grey and Lord Haldane, 
 then Mr. Lloyd George, and now, they say, 
 sometimes Mr. Pringle. 
 
 A story is told of a consultation between 
 counsel at the close of the Parnell Commission, 
 when Mr. Asquith was asked by Lord Russell 
 what he should say next day. Mr. Asquith 
 began to sketch an admirable summary of the 
 points in the evidence, when Lord Russell, who 
 had good reason to respect his intellectual 
 calibre, broke out impatiently, " Asquith, I 
 am ashamed of you ; / shall talk the history of 
 Oireland." The spare relevancy, so becoming 
 to the scholar, breaks down at moments of 
 crisis. In genius there is always a tangential 
 quality. The lack of it has been Mr. Asquith's 
 great limitation, for without it there can be no 
 creative power, and he has none. 
 
 When Mr. Asquith moves out of the penum- 
 bra of Gladstone he is a Liberal Imperialist in 
 close association with Lord Grey and Lord
 
 118 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Haldane, and at issue both with the official 
 leader of the party and with the great majority 
 of the followers too. That Mr. Asquith should 
 have identified himself with the minority in 
 this way may have been due to a miscalcula- 
 tion of forces, but more probably was the 
 expression of an instinctive preference. He is 
 constitutionally averse from extremes, and the 
 logic of left-wing Liberalism, even if he had 
 not had faith in the essential sanity of British 
 Imperialism abroad as an instrument of liberty, 
 doubtless offended a nature at once tolerant 
 and exact. But his modern relations with 
 Mr. Lloyd George are not to be understood 
 unless it is remembered that he was for long 
 in revolt against Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- 
 man. When Sir Henry died, Mr. Asquith was 
 chosen to be the new Prime Minister, but 
 his views on some subjects, and still more 
 his critical and unenthusiastic temperament, 
 divided him from the majority of his party. 
 He was the titular head, but he held office like 
 a constitutional monarch by following his Prime 
 Minister in this case Mr. Lloyd George. 
 
 Thus early was formed the habit which made 
 him a failure in war the habit of regarding 
 his office as that of an arbitrator, whose chief 
 duty was to compose differences and maintain 
 unity within the party. He did not impose
 
 MR. ASQUITH 119 
 
 his own will on the Cabinet, but was the 
 resultant of forces within it. In the sham 
 fights of party warfare, that was well enough ; 
 but, when real war came, the nation insisted 
 on a leader, not on a chairman of committees, 
 and it got Mr. Lloyd George, who had just the 
 qualities that Mr. Asquith had not. It would 
 be unfair not to add that on Mr. Asquith fell 
 the responsibility of war for its first and longer 
 half, and that he sustained the burden, if not 
 with success, at any rate with singular dignity 
 and with the most sensitive regard for national 
 honour. There are some speeches of Mr. 
 Asquith' s made towards the beginning of the 
 war that every Englishman would take an 
 oath upon, as on a Bible, so pure is their 
 patriotism, so compact of justice their expres- 
 sion. He was not leading ; but sometimes he 
 interpreted as no one has done before or since. 
 It would be one of the paradoxes of politics, 
 were not this sort of thing always happening, 
 that Mr. Lloyd George, twelve years ago the 
 hope of the stern unbending Radicals, should 
 now be the mediator and compromiser, and 
 Mr. Asquith the old Liberal Leaguer, the leader 
 of the forlorn hopes of the old official Liberalism. 
 And the paradox is more violent still when it is 
 remembered that Mr. Lloyd George was the 
 chief enemy of entanglement in the affairs of
 
 120 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Europe almost up to the last. In 1914 there 
 were many subjects of disagreement between 
 them, and they sat side by side ; now there 
 are few and they sit in opposition. Mr. 
 Asquith is singularly free from the vices of 
 the mean and ungenerous nature. He forgives 
 easily, at any rate he would if left to himself, 
 and he never allows personal ambition to stand 
 between him and the sun of duty whose 
 warmth he so enjoys. Yet he is leader of the 
 Opposition when, on nine subjects out of ten, 
 his convictions are on the Ministerial side. 
 He does it badly in consequence. Why should 
 they have changed the places which ten years 
 ago everyone would have predicted that they 
 would now have been occupying in a Coali- 
 tion ? Mainly because Conservatism has lived 
 for generations on its Radical recruits, but 
 cannot get on with the Whigs, however close 
 their views may be. 
 
 Mr. Asquith used to be reproached with 
 being a trimmer. Perhaps he is, in tactics ; 
 but his convictions are viscous rather than 
 fluid, and he has the greatest difficulty in 
 modifying them. His Irish policy, for example, 
 is a mere ghost of the Gladstonian controversies 
 and stands in no sort of relation with changed 
 political conditions. He cannot turn a political 
 position, and the strange spectacle is witnessed
 
 MR. ASQUITH 121 
 
 of a statesman constitutionally averse from 
 extremes drawing out the Gladstonian ideas 
 on Ireland to impossible lengths rather than 
 reconstruct a new policy of reform out of the 
 old elements. His politics are too concerned 
 with forms, not enough with realities. He 
 occupies, in fact, much the same relation to 
 Progressive forces as the Cecils to those of 
 Conservatism ; like theirs, all his instincts are 
 aristocratic, though, in his case, it is an aris- 
 tocracy of mind. His obstinacy, his rigid 
 intellectual honesty, and his strict truthfulness 
 have never been more conspicuous than since 
 his arrival in the present Parliament ; and, 
 in some ways, he seems a more admirable 
 figure on the front Opposition bench now, 
 squeezed in between the unyielding Mr. Adam- 
 son and the more elastic Mr. Hogge, than when 
 he was Prime Minister. Then he recited prize 
 compositions from a rostrum of Wait and See ; 
 now he is in a false position on the floor, but 
 maintains, by his very ineffectiveness as a 
 party leader, his reputation for honesty. 
 
 He does not like the present House, nor does 
 it like him, and one reason is that he has never 
 made a serious attempt to understand it. 
 When Mr. Balfour came back after his defeat 
 in 1906, his first speech in a House that for the 
 most part knew his name only was a failure,
 
 122 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 and he sat down for some months of silence to 
 learn its peculiarities. Mr. Asquith has never 
 paid this House that compliment, but if he 
 did, he would have a similar reward to Balfour's. 
 Better still would it have been if Mr. Asquith 
 had not sat on the Liberal front Opposition 
 bench, but on the cross-benches, where his 
 influence would have been greater and he 
 could have been wholly himself. And he would 
 have been nearer to the Cecil group, an alliance 
 with whom seems to be the natural destiny of 
 the variety of Liberalism for which Mr. Asquith 
 stands. His hatred for the new bureaucracy, 
 his genuine zeal for economy, his individualism, 
 are all points of contact with the group. Their 
 philosophy of politics is much the same, and 
 their specific differences are falling off, one 
 after the other, for lack of nourishment. 
 
 It is usual nowadays to shed tears over 
 Mr. Asquith, and even to read moral sermons 
 over his career. But there is no obvious reason 
 for treating him like a Decline and Fall. His 
 success has not been below his abilities, and a 
 man who was at the head of affairs in the first 
 half of the war, whatever his faults may have 
 been, may one day walk with Pitt in Elysium. 
 The sensitiveness and reserve with which he 
 himself would wish to hide the life that is 
 his own is worthy of admiration and ought to
 
 MR. ASQUITH 123 
 
 have been respected more than it has been. 
 Intellectual men all have their sharp reactions, 
 and it is the chief fault in his philosophy that 
 it gives too much room in life to pure intellect, 
 and so makes for a stronger reaction which has 
 sometimes puzzled his more straight-laced 
 admirers. But in public affairs his personal 
 character has often shown nobility, and has 
 always been pure from the grosser and meaner 
 motives.
 
 MR. BONAR LAW
 
 MR. BONAR LAW (WITH LORD CARSON).
 
 VIII 
 MR. BONAR LAW 
 
 OH, sheer patient hulk of the British 
 Conservative Party, always aground 
 under its home-bred captains, and 
 bumping its invulnerable ribs against the 
 flowing tide, wind and water tight only under 
 borrowed captains and crews ! 
 
 First it is Disraeli, the Radical * from the 
 East, who gets the stranded craft afloat, and 
 navigates it into strange waters in quest of 
 the Conservative working-man ; then the ex- 
 Radical, Joseph Chamberlain, rediscovering 
 the British Empire ; and after him Mr. Bonar 
 Law, fidus Achates to the reputed worst Radical 
 of them all, and brought all the way from 
 Canada to take command of the ship. For 
 
 1 Radical throughout these essays is used in the sense that 
 the word has in England, not in America. In America, a 
 Radical is a Social Revolutionary, who manages to keep out 
 of gaol only by calling himself a Liberal. But in England, 
 Radical was (and still is) a title of honour which the left 
 wing of Liberals like to assume to themselves. He is a man 
 who rejects, for good and for evil, the Whig traditions of the 
 Liberal Party ; and on that account has often found it easier 
 to co-operate with the Conservatives than with the official 
 Liberals. 
 
 127
 
 128 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Mr. Bonar Law, too, though a genuine Con- 
 servative and attached to the party in a sense 
 in which Disraeli and Chamberlain never were, 
 is still not native to it. He never warmed a 
 proprietorial back at the arae et foci of the 
 party, and in his aloofness from its older 
 traditions he might still be in Canada. By 
 comparison with Lord Long, or even with 
 Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he is the newest of 
 men, and that in a party which still likes to 
 think of itself as of the soil, racy. But 
 though the latest to be imposed, his authority, 
 until his breakdown at the beginning of 1921, 
 was never seriously challenged. The old stock 
 patiently bears the fruit of its latest graft 
 miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma 
 
 Thus pears and quinces from the crabtree come ; 
 And thus the ruddy cornel bears the plum. 
 
 Yet one recognises how inevitable, after all, 
 the succession in leadership was from Disraeli 
 to Bonar Law. Disraeli found the Tories the 
 party of a faction humiliated with defeat, torn 
 with secession, and destined, so it seemed, to 
 an early and unhonoured death. He made it 
 once more a living and national party, and 
 found for it millions of unsuspected allies in 
 the electorate, and all that on the condition 
 which seemed to many at the time the merest
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 129 
 
 trifle that it ceased to be a Tory and became 
 the Conservative Party. When, after the 
 Cecilian interregnum, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain 
 became a member of the party, it was no 
 longer Conservative and had become Unionist, 
 and again the change of name concealed a 
 revolution. The new party became a party of 
 advanced social reform ; the breath of romance 
 which Disraeli had found on the Hindu Kush, 
 Chamberlain rediscovered in the illimitable 
 veld, and in a material age it was none the less 
 refreshing to most people for blowing across a 
 gold reef; and finally there came the Tariff 
 Reform proposals, uniting the squirearchy of 
 the country and the factory, and proposing to 
 rewrite Conservatism in the terms of a new 
 political economy and of a new Imperial unity. 
 Mr. Chamberlain had a genius for friendship, 
 and no one was ever more loyal to colleagues 
 and chief than he. Of a warmer and more 
 impetuous nature, he was certainly fonder of 
 Mr. Balfour than Mr. Balfour was of him. 
 But he captured the imagination of the party 
 as Disraeli had done before him, and as Mr. 
 Lloyd George captured that of the Liberals 
 later, and it was inevitable that the lieutenant 
 should become the real leader of the party. 
 Before the hot breath of the new Protection, 
 coming as from the mouth of a furnace, the 
 9
 
 130 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 influence of Mr. Balfour in the party counsels 
 shrivelled and fell. It was now that Mr. Bonar 
 Law came into prominence. He entered Parlia- 
 ment in the khaki election of 1900, and when 
 the Tariff Reform controversy was joined he 
 found himself in a temperature that exactly 
 suited him. Mr. Chamberlain became a Tariff 
 Reformer as it were by accident, because he 
 was keen on Imperial union. Mr. Bonar Law 
 seems to have been born one. Mr. Chamber- 
 lain invented his arguments to illustrate his 
 theory, but with Mr. Law figures and theory 
 had grown up together inextricably inter- 
 twined. Very soon he was known as the only 
 man who could argue the case really well, and 
 the waistcoat pocket from which he drew the 
 relevant figures and the damaging quotation 
 became a legendary dungeon of Tariff Reform 
 lore. 
 
 It is easy to under- estimate the highly 
 specialised gifts that Mr. Bonar Law revealed 
 at this time, and doubtless at any other time 
 they would have carried him nothing like so 
 far. English politics from 1903 onwards were 
 one vast sea of statistics, on which Mr. Bonar 
 Law bobbed up and down like a cork, and alone 
 never got a ducking. But his opportune 
 ability to handle figures was the sign, not the 
 whole, of his power. He is sometimes taken as
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 131 
 
 the representative business man in politics. 
 Nothing of the kind, for the typical modern 
 business man is a man either of powerful 
 imagination or of wishy-washy sentiment, and 
 he has neither. He stands rather for the 
 Northern passion for argument. In the South 
 people never argue with each other ; they are 
 content to say what they think, to diffuse the 
 appropriate temperamental aura about what 
 they say, and if that does not persuade they 
 give it up. But in the North argumentation 
 is a passion. Opinions really are changed by 
 the turning and twisting of words, and an 
 argument with which a man disagrees is not 
 something to shrug his shoulders at, but to hit 
 on the head if he can. It is the difference 
 between an evangelical and a ceremonial 
 religion. 
 
 This passion for argumentation is the per- 
 manent and distinguishing quality in Mr. 
 Bonar Law. When he comes into the House 
 he looks the plain, kind-hearted, decent man, 
 dressed as though for kirk. The eyes are wide 
 open and shy ; the manner, when his critics 
 are talking, is the blend of deference and resig- 
 nation with which people listen to a sermon. 
 But when he rises to reply one becomes con- 
 scious of ability of a rare and curious kind. 
 He cannot create an atmosphere, he has no
 
 132 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 saliences of phrase, his gestures are undis- 
 tinguished, and the voice is thin, dull, and 
 before his resignation a little indistinct and low. 
 But if you regard argument as the weaving of an 
 intricate pattern, there is no one in the House 
 to approach him for skill. You feel when he 
 rises that he can never get under your rhetorical 
 guard, and then suddenly the net is round you, 
 and you are caught in meshes of argumentation 
 so fine that you hardly know that they are 
 there until you feel yourself powerless. Beware 
 of the retiarius. 
 
 Conservative party politics in the last half- 
 generation must be read as a long duel often 
 fought unconsciously in sleep or waking dreams 
 between the Balfourians and Chamberlain- 
 ites, between those for whom the chief function 
 of Conservatism is criticism and resistance to 
 change, and those who have absorbed the 
 Radical innovating spirit which Disraeli intro- 
 duced and Chamberlain strengthened, and 
 who are never satisfied unless the party has 
 reform windmills of its own to tilt at ; between 
 those who love tradition, quietness, and the 
 peaceful broad acres of national life, and on 
 the other hand the crusaders, the propagan- 
 dists, the modernists, the industrialists of the 
 party. For the crisis between the compromising 
 hedgers and the last-ditchers in the controversies
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 133 
 
 of 1911, which made Mr. Bonar Law the Leader 
 of the Opposition, was a clash not only 
 between policies, but of temperaments, and it 
 was continuous along the lines of cleavage 
 which began with Disraeli and deepened with 
 Chamberlain. Mr. Bonar Law was selected to 
 lead because he had fewer enemies than either 
 Mr. Austen Chamberlain or Mr. Long. At the 
 time the party was surprised at the choice and 
 inclined to be apologetic. But it chose more 
 wisely than it knew. 
 
 It is a tempting speculation what might have 
 happened had George Wyndham lived. He 
 was a man who, if he had kept his health and 
 his application, could have bridged the gulf 
 between the old and the new in the Conserva- 
 tive Party, who united some of the reformer's 
 ardour with respect for the humane and 
 civilised traditions of the party, and who, 
 above all, had the gift of sympathy with 
 Ireland, and not with the Scottish end of it 
 alone. Mr. Bonar Law has always had the 
 good fortune of timeliness, not only in the 
 moment when he entered politics, but also in 
 the moment of his election to the leadership. 
 A few years later and the crest of the enthusi- 
 asm which brought him to the fore would have 
 been the trough. On the Tariff Reform issue 
 Balfour was right, and Chamberlain and his
 
 134 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 successors were wrong ; the frontal attack on 
 Free Trade was tactically wrong, and the 
 subtle methods of Balfour had a better chance 
 of success. Perhaps but for the Tariff Reform 
 issue Mr. Balfour might have been strong 
 enough to keep Wyndham. Ireland might 
 have been comfortably settled before the war, 
 and alliance between the Conservative Party 
 and Ulster might have been less crippling. It 
 is on Ireland that Mr. Bonar Law reveals his 
 defects most unmistakably. There is a narrow 
 provinciality, a certain coarse grain of prejudice 
 when he speaks about Ireland that is not in 
 accord with the better traditions of the Con- 
 servative Party. Yet if one compares him 
 with Balfour in this respect, it is not to his 
 disadvantage. Bonar Law is at any rate 
 sincere on Ireland ; what's bred in the bone 
 comes out in the flesh ; and he never aban- 
 doned a conviction or a friend. Mr. Balfour, 
 when he threw over Wyndham, certainly did 
 the one, and perhaps did both. 
 
 It is sometimes regarded as one of the 
 paradoxes of politics that Mr. Bonar Law, who 
 came into power in the political crisis caused 
 by Mr. Lloyd George's turbulent period as 
 second-in-command under Mr. Asquith, should 
 have become so close a friend. In reality the 
 two have a great deal in common, even apart
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 135 
 
 from the immediate programme of the Coalition 
 Party. Both represent in their old parties the 
 Radical disruptive spirit ; both were rebels 
 against the passive distinction and sterile 
 humanities of their old chiefs ; both had out- 
 grown the old party formula; and neither would 
 ever have been happy in the strait- waist coat 
 of the old two-party system. Mr. Lloyd 
 George never was a Gladstonian Home Ruler, 
 never a Cobdenite Liberal. Similarly for Mr. 
 Bonar Law a great part of Conservatism is a 
 closed book. Even when they differ, they are 
 complements, the opposites that attract. To 
 an impressionist like Mr. Lloyd George, the 
 pre-Raphaelite argumentation of Mr. Bonar 
 Law was invaluable in a leader of the House. 
 Invaluable, too, are the simple honesty of Mr. 
 Bonar Law's character, his directness, and his 
 unswerving loyalty. 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George has done much for the 
 politics of his lieutenant. Apart from his 
 passion for Tariff Reform and his very unhelp- 
 ful views about Ireland, Mr. Bonar Law had 
 no political ideas of his own. But he had on 
 a great many subjects of domestic policy an 
 open mind, and into it Mr. Lloyd George put 
 many new and productive thoughts. You may 
 think as poorly as you will about the work of 
 the Coalition, but imagine undiluted Con-
 
 136 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 servatives running the policy of the country 
 since the war, and the storms through which we 
 have gone would seem a haven of rest compared 
 with the turmoil that we might have had. Mr. 
 Bonar Law, too, has done service to his chief. 
 But for his assistance at the end of 1916, Mr. 
 Asquith would have remained in power, and 
 the war would have been prolonged or lost. 
 It was Mr. Bonar Law, again, who made the 
 alliance between the Conservatives and the 
 Coalition Liberals possible, and when his 
 health broke down, the emotion of Mr. Lloyd 
 George in announcing the temporary retire- 
 ment of his Conservative colleague was not 
 histrionical, but proof of a very sincere personal 
 friendship. Mr. Lloyd George knew that the 
 departure of Mr. Bonar Law inevitably meant 
 the widening of the breach between the two 
 wings of the Coalitionists, and his anticipations 
 are being fulfilled. The breach, which sooner 
 or later seems certain, is, perhaps, as well for 
 Mr. Lloyd George, for valuable as was Mr. 
 Bonar Law's personal influence with the Con- 
 servatives, the alliance, between them was in 
 many respects unequal. Mr. Bonar Law 
 brought no ideas into the common stock, and 
 pinioned the flight of Mr. Lloyd George's 
 genius perhaps inflicted an irreparable injury 
 on his reputation. And yet one doubts whether
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 137 
 
 the stories of disagreement between the two 
 had any real foundation. No one can be 
 certain which of the rival set of views within 
 the Coalitionist party will ultimately leaven 
 the lump. But had Mr. Bonar Law not left 
 politics, one might safely have hazarded a 
 prediction. If and when the Conservative 
 Party broke away from Mr. Lloyd George, it 
 would no longer have been under the lead of 
 Mr. Bonar Law ; and should the Prime Minister, 
 as so many expect, move to the Left in politics, 
 Mr. Bonar Law would still have been found at 
 his side, faithful and loyal always always 
 helpful in the minor tactics, hampering in the 
 larger strategy of politics.
 
 MR. WINSTON 
 CHURCHILL
 
 [L.N.A. 
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
 
 XI 
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 SOME men hang themselves on their 
 politics, others hang their politics on 
 themselves, and these need to be stout 
 pegs, well screwed into the scheme of things, 
 as indeed Mr. Churchill is. He manages it very 
 well. His first party will still have no good 
 said of him, his second believes him to be 
 hankering after his first love, and latterly he 
 has been advertising for a new Centre Party 
 which is to combine the charms of the other 
 two. But even if this third match came off 
 and then turned out ill, Mr. Churchill would 
 not be greatly embarrassed, for wherever he is 
 there is his party. 
 
 That is not to say that he is unprincipled or 
 self-seeking. On the contrary, he has a very 
 lofty conception of duty in public affairs, and 
 there is high authority for the view that to be 
 true to oneself is to be false to no one else. In 
 politics there is often more falseness, and even 
 treachery, in consistency than in change, and 
 of Mr. Churchill almost alone among politicians 
 
 141
 
 142 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 it may truthfully be said that he is always 
 candid, always himself, in his public utterances. 
 Even if it were not part of his public conscience, 
 why should he not be when to be himself is to 
 be so variably interesting ? In Lancashire, 
 a saying of his used to be quoted that the 
 Churchills die young, the inference being 
 that Mr. Churchill changed sides because he 
 recognised at the beginning of the century 
 that the Liberals were in for a long lease of 
 power. That was certainly the Conservative 
 view of the matter, but Mr. Churchill's faults 
 are those of an impetuous not of a calculating 
 nature, and the more likely explanation of his 
 defection was some resemblance, real but 
 exaggerated by the son's loyalty, between the 
 politics of that time and of the period of his 
 father's resignation. 
 
 That the son is intensely loyal to his father's 
 memory we know from one of the best political 
 biographies in the language, and it was natural, 
 entering politics so young and without much 
 wardrobe of his own, that he should use his 
 father's old suits his zeal for economy and 
 fiscal purity (what repelled him most of 
 Protection was always its temptations to 
 political corruption) and his dislike of certain 
 forms of Imperialism. Already in South Africa 
 he had given great offence by pleading for
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 143 
 
 conciliation with the beaten but still resisting 
 Boers. Having elected to go over to the 
 Liberals, the zeal of the convert followed as a 
 matter of course. Mr. Churchill does nothing 
 by halves. Certainly, no one expressed the 
 dominant creed of 1906 with such fervour of 
 apparent conviction, and thus early was put 
 in pickle the rod that was used so bitterly in 
 the middle of the war. From 1906 to 1910 
 Mr. Churchill was very thick with Mr. Lloyd 
 George, and Mr. Churchill made some con- 
 tributions of his own notably the Labour 
 Exchanges to the " social policy " of those 
 days. 
 
 In everything he does or says there has 
 always been a certain amplitude. He is the 
 only subaltern who ever had the hardihood to 
 have views of his own on the North- West 
 Frontier, and the literary gift to make them 
 interesting. Only a few years after this first 
 book of his he was criticising Lord Kitchener 
 for his conduct of the Sudan campaign. He 
 never forgets that he is the descendant of our 
 only military strategist, and he believes in 
 hereditary missions and inherited gifts. He has 
 a finely dramatic sense, and at one time he had 
 the John Burns gift of always being about 
 whenever anything was to be done in character. 
 He escapes from a Boer prison and the thing
 
 144 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 becomes an Odyssey ; there is a fight with 
 some Russian anarchists in a back street, and 
 he makes it a veritable siege of Lille guns, 
 oaths, bravura complete. Physically brave, he 
 loves danger for its romance, while not forgetting 
 that real adventure with a dash of colour is as 
 good as a sky-sign advertisement. 
 
 And yet with this tendency to the theatrical 
 there goes a rich vein of common sense, and his 
 natural genius is fortified by an amazing power 
 of application and hard work. He can be 
 "viewy" about what does not matter, but he 
 never leaves in the air an opinion seriously 
 held, without having a host of arguments and 
 facts ready to support it on the flanks. He is 
 vain but not conceited, and with regard to his 
 own work keenly conscientious. Nothing is 
 more to his credit than the development of his 
 power in debate. He took great risks when he 
 entered on a political career, for his copiousness 
 of expression and fecundity of ideas did not 
 guarantee him success on the platform, or in 
 debate. The voice is harsh, with some slight 
 impediment, and, like many people who excel, 
 he is not free from nervousness. The perfect 
 logical architecture, the happy phrase and 
 rich formal rhetoric have always been his, 
 but at first they were the virtues of the man of 
 letters rather than the orator. He always
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 145 
 
 carried heavy guns, but they were not mobile. 
 Now he is one of the best of debaters. He 
 can create an atmosphere, he is a master of 
 dangerous retort, and always there is the sense 
 of power and mastery. It is the result of 
 sheer hard work and of a power of self-criticism 
 with which he is not usually credited. 
 
 When the father's clothes, in spite of repeated 
 dyeing, had to be discarded, he emerges as a 
 very creditable Whig, and that angered the 
 Tories the more, for they have always hated 
 Whigs more than Radicals. At the Admiralty 
 he withstood the economists and founded a 
 Naval General Staff (a very poor one), and it 
 was due to one of his alert decisions that the 
 Fleet was fully mobilised at the outbreak of 
 war. He has great qualities as an adminis- 
 trator, but they are hardly those which one 
 would have expected of him. It would not 
 have surprised anybody to find one so 
 irreverent of authority, so original in concep- 
 tion, and so daring in execution starting new 
 ideas and running them to death. Nothing of 
 the kind. He is industrious and makes himself 
 master of detail, he balances judiciously and 
 more often than not declines to the conven- 
 tional. 
 
 One could imagine a man of Mr. Churchill's 
 great intellectual power carrying out reforms 
 10
 
 146 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 at the Admiralty that would have made the 
 early naval history of the war a very different 
 thing, for the Navy was ready for war in every- 
 thing but that which mattered most, the habit 
 of independent and unconventional thought, 
 and this he might have supplied. At the War 
 Office at the end of the war the same oppor- 
 tunity seemed to offer, and again there is the 
 same disappointment. There is tremendous 
 efficiency and business ability, and feats of 
 organisation are accomplished, but of the man 
 himself, with his sheer intellectual power and 
 his fertility of ideas, there is no sign. It may 
 be after all that the fabric of his thinking 
 is conventional, and only its colouring and 
 expression are original ; or it may be that his 
 mind does not gear readily to other minds, 
 and that he must either think and act inde- 
 pendently for himself, or when that is impos- 
 sible tumefy the conventions. 
 
 The second is probably the true explanation 
 for what, after all, is the salient fact in Mr. 
 Churchill's career, that he is always raising 
 expectations and disappointing them, and that 
 each disappointment leaves one not a whit 
 less expectant than before. It covers, too, 
 the tragedies of Antwerp and Gallipoli. As 
 strategical conceptions they were the best on 
 either side in the war, and worthy of Blenheim.
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 147 
 
 The first fastened on the great blunder of 
 German strategy that in its absurd confidence 
 of ending the war on the West in six weeks it 
 had left this right flank uncovered. What else 
 were the agonies of Passchendaele three years 
 later but the foul nightmare of this lost 
 strategic opportunity ? The Dardanelles 
 enterprise, again, would, had it succeeded, 
 have saved Russia, hastened the collapse of 
 Austria by two years, and reduced the cam- 
 paigns in Turkey to the dimensions of a small 
 war. To one who sees these things in a flash, 
 as Mr. Churchill did, the delays of persuasion 
 are a torture. At Antwerp it was necessary 
 to act precipitately or not at all, but in the 
 Dardanelles delay would have done no harm, 
 and in an evil hour he committed himself to a 
 purely naval attack. 
 
 Yet Churchill was right in wanting to renew 
 the attack next day, for it would have suc- 
 ceeded, as we now know, and the younger 
 naval men were with him right to the end of 
 the disastrous enterprise. In the land cam- 
 paign in Gallipoli the luck was even more 
 peevishly perverse. When the last attempt 
 to capture the Peninsula was made by the 
 landing at Suvla, there were in front of the 
 British divisions the merest handful of Turkish 
 irregulars. The nearest Turkish regulars, who
 
 148 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 were not engaged, were under one Suleiman, 
 more than fifty miles away when the landing 
 took place. The story (based on Turkish 
 authority) is that Suleiman at once set out on 
 the march, and that his van reached the hills 
 above the plain and sank down there exhausted, 
 about the same time that Sir Ian Hamilton 
 was reproaching General Stopford for two 
 wasted days. In this frightful cross-purposing 
 of precipitation and delay, of heroism, ill-luck, 
 and victory missed by hours and yards, the 
 gentlest lost their tempers, and it looked as 
 though Churchill's career was irretrievably 
 ruined. But, more fortunate than Alcibiades 
 after his Sicilian expedition, he always had a 
 band of friends to do him justice, and among 
 them was the Prime Minister. Mr. Lloyd 
 George himself was an Easterner, though not 
 identified with the Dardanelles enterprise, and 
 he knew that but for the grace of God he 
 might himself have been in the tumbril. But 
 Mr. Lloyd George, though an Easterner always, 
 preferred the Balkan solution, and it was in 
 fact the decision to land men at Salonica that 
 made the abandonment of the Gallipoli enter- 
 prise inevitable. The history of the alternate 
 attraction and repulsion of these two men for 
 each other would make an instructive chapter 
 of political psychology. Thrice they have
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 149 
 
 started as though on parallel lines, and each 
 time they insensibly diverged until a rupture 
 was only to be avoided by making another 
 start. Twice it has been avoided so ; the third 
 time it may be impossible. 
 
 Mr. Churchill belongs to no school of politics, 
 and will not found one, and he has ceased even 
 to be the revenant of the old Fourth Party. 
 But he will never be out of politics for long, 
 for he is even more dangerous as an enemy than 
 as a friend. He has latterly become steadily 
 more Conservative, less from conviction than 
 from the hardening of his political arteries. 
 His early Liberal velleities have dried up, the 
 generous impulses of youth throb more slowly, 
 and apart from some intellectual gristle his 
 only connections with Liberalism are personal. 
 He is out of sympathy with the Prime Minister's 
 Russian policy, and he has a vigorous contempt 
 for the Parliamentary Labour Party, which he 
 takes no trouble to conceal. 
 
 In certain directions he has seemed to suffer 
 from the fixed idea. If the Conservatives were 
 wiser they would have made an attempt to 
 recapture him, but there again personal feelings 
 stand in the way, for neither Bourbons nor 
 Orleanists can get on with the Bonapartists. 
 At present he is indispensable to a Coalition 
 which is suffering from the starvation of able
 
 150 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 men, but if it develops towards the left, as 
 seems most likely, one sees Churchill, in spite 
 of personal prejudices, becoming a leader of a 
 new Tory party with ideas. For by that time 
 the fiscal issue will have become obsolescent, 
 and there will be room in the party for a new 
 Canning who, satirising needy knife-grinders 
 and axe-grinders, will shape foreign policy with 
 dignity and wisdom.
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN
 
 \N.I. 
 
 MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN.
 
 X 
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 IT is better to be the father of a famous 
 son than the son of a famous father, for 
 the one plight illumines merit that 
 would else have remained obscure, while the 
 other by comparison makes honest talent seem 
 mere mediocrity. 
 
 Mr. Austen Chamberlain has suffered in that 
 way. But if he owed his opportunities to his 
 father, his reputation after twenty-three years 
 of political life is now his own and, such as it 
 is, has been earned on his own merits and 
 demerits. Entirely his own making, too, is his 
 personal popularity and a curious formal 
 courtesy in debate which is unique. It is odd 
 that the son of a man who had so rough a 
 tongue should be almost the only formalist 
 now left in debate ; odd, too, that the son 
 should revert, against the tendency of the age, 
 to the rhetorical periods which his father dis- 
 carded, when they were in fashion, for his own 
 incomparable style. But the younger men 
 sometimes will go a generation back instead of 
 a generation forward. He is one of the few 
 
 153
 
 154 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 men who will wear his silk hat in listening to 
 debate. To see him with his hat tilted over 
 his eyes and his arms folded, apparently 
 slumbering, is to sit on Mr. Wells's time- 
 machine and be carried back to mid- Victorian 
 politics. Perhaps that is it. He may be, in 
 fact he is, mid- Victorian. 
 
 He was bred to politics. Rugby, Cambridge 
 under Seeley, the Ecole des Sciences Politiques 
 of Paris, and something at Berlin each contri- 
 buted in turn to his character or accomplish- 
 ment ; his father, evidently, planned his 
 education so that he should be like himself 
 with the corners knocked off and the hollows 
 filled in. He began his political life as his 
 father's private secretary ; Gladstone's com- 
 pliment to his maiden speech on Home Rule in 
 1892, that it was a speech to gladden a father's 
 heart, was not only deserved by the speaker 
 but, incidentally, was one of the few nice 
 things that Gladstone ever said about a Cham- 
 berlain. Then he ran through the usual cursus 
 honorum of minor offices, doing everything 
 quite well, if without distinction, and all the 
 time increasing his claim to consideration for 
 himself and not for his father's sake. He was 
 in every respect superior to the average son of 
 a great name. He had ability, character, 
 plenty of information, and, unlike the ordinary
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 155 
 
 young aristocrat, realised the importance of 
 being earnest. A little more and he might 
 have captured the imagination of his party and 
 become its leader, for with Mr. Balfour out of 
 the way, his rivals were not dangerous. What 
 was it that was lacking ? 
 
 He had no power of original thought, but 
 that was not very serious, for, like other 
 politicians, he might have borrowed the ideas 
 of others. But the one thing necessary to 
 achieve real distinction is to bring something 
 new into them from without a gospel of 
 sorts, a new idiom of thought or expression, 
 some new leaven or it may be an explosive. 
 Mr. Chamberlain's whole bringing up had been 
 such as to make that impossible in his case. 
 He began life with a ready-made political 
 programme as though any programme were of 
 any use unless you have helped to make it 
 yourself! He saw his politics so much as a 
 family affair that he might just as well have 
 belonged to one of the Whig ruling houses. 
 If his father had been a Whig, all his great 
 ability could never have carried him so far ; 
 but the son's whole training might have been 
 designed to reconstitute the Whiggery which his 
 father's career had done so much to overthrow. 
 
 The Unionist Party in the stormy days that 
 followed the election of 1906, having cast out
 
 156 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 the Cecil dynasty, was not in the mood to set 
 up a Chamberlain dynasty, and perhaps it 
 recognised instinctively that, in spite of the 
 vigour and orthodoxy of his Unionist faith, his 
 whole habit of mind was still that of its heredi- 
 tary enemies, the Whigs. What is a rising 
 politician to do who has all his life seen politics 
 from the inside and belongs to a ruling family 
 which has lost its political prerogatives ? 
 There are only two alternatives. Either he 
 goes to the House of Lords, or he throws in his 
 lot with that other power behind the throne of 
 democracy, the Civil Service. Mr. Chamber- 
 lain took the second alternative. He is not, 
 of course, a member of the Civil Service, but 
 he is the embodied representative in politics of 
 its spirit. Perhaps that has been the trouble 
 with him from first to last, that he is not really 
 a politician at all, but a Civil servant who 
 happens to hold a position in the Government. 
 It is not a crime to be a Civil servant, but 
 the qualities of mind that make a man a good 
 bureaucrat disqualify him for creative politics. 
 In ordinary times, when what is best adminis- 
 tered may be best, Ministers may be wise who 
 are content to express the ideas of their per- 
 manent officials in appropriate Parliamentary 
 language, though that was not Mr. Joseph 
 Chamberlain's way at the Colonial Office. Mr.
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 157 
 
 Austen Chamberlain's mature years were cast 
 in extraordinary times. He was Secretary for 
 India in the early part of the Great War. A 
 statesman would have cast about for some 
 simple general idea of the sort of assistance 
 that India could most usefully render, and 
 would have devised plans to suit his conclusion 
 and resolutely fought all deviations from it. 
 Obviously the work for India in the war was to 
 defeat Turkey, and when the Mesopotamian 
 delta had been secured by the occupation of 
 Kurneh, the natural strategy for India was not 
 to pursue a campaign in the interior of a 
 country which India did not want, but to cut 
 the communications with Constantinople either 
 by forcing the Dardanelles or at Alexandretta. 
 These objects could have been attained by the 
 same or less effort as was expended on the 
 expeditions to Baghdad and beyond. 
 
 It may be objected that it was not Mr. 
 Chamberlain's business to foresee and work 
 for these ends, but that of the Commander-in- 
 Chief in India, and that is no doubt true. But 
 a statesman would have foreseen where the 
 Civil servant did not. The function of the 
 statesman is to define the end, and of the Civil 
 servant to devise the means. Mr. Chamber- 
 lain's mind remained that of the Civil servant, 
 obsequious to the course of events but fore-
 
 158 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 stalling, originating nothing. One hastens to 
 add that it had all the Civil servant's sense of 
 honour, for he took on himself the blame for 
 the scandals that followed in Mesopotamia. 
 
 The same bureaucratic habit of mind was 
 even more clearly revealed in his tenure of 
 the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. The 
 statesman- Chancellor would have early seen 
 that the country neither would nor could stand 
 a scale of taxation in peace to which it had 
 cheerfully submitted in war. He would have 
 insisted on that view and have refused to take 
 office unless it was accepted. Having got it 
 accepted, he would have revived all the old 
 rigours of Treasury control over expenditure, 
 and there would have been no thunderstorm 
 at Dover or anywhere else. But Mr. Chamber- 
 lain is a Civil Service Chancellor. Not for him 
 to shape the ends of policy, to foresee the 
 gathering storm, to resist tendencies of policy 
 that as Chancellor he deplores. What he does 
 is to interpret the wishes of others into the 
 language of finance ; like a good Civil servant 
 he stands by his class and defends them 
 through thick and thin ; the Government of 
 the country is the fixed star, and all other 
 interests revolve round it observing order due 
 in obedience to its gravitation. 
 
 The means he took to the ends that he
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 159 
 
 has consented to let others lay down for him 
 may not be his own fault, but that of his 
 official advisers. Certainly his lowering of the 
 Excess Profits Duty one year in expectation of 
 a collapse that did not come, and his raising it 
 in the next year when the collapse did come 
 was a double miscalculation that destroys any 
 chance of a reputation for financial prescience. 
 But the gravamen of the charge against Mr. 
 Chamberlain is not the mistakes that he has 
 made, but that he is a Civil servant with the 
 interests, the sympathies, and the philosophy 
 of the service, which thinks always that if 
 departmental wheels hum sweetly all is wel 1 
 with the country. The ideal Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer would be a master of the Govern- 
 ment and a servant of the people. Mr. Cham- 
 berlain has been the people's master and the 
 Government's servant. Perhaps it was in any 
 case beyond the power of anyone to discipline 
 national finance, but Mr. Chamberlain might 
 have tried harder if the bent of his mind had 
 been other than it was, and the placing of 
 Treasury control in the hands of a Cabinet 
 Committee would then have been a victory of 
 his policy instead of a criticism. Nor would 
 there have been any talk of the Indian Vice- 
 royalty for him. 
 
 When Bonar Law retired through ill-health,
 
 160 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 it was inevitable that Mr. Chamberlain should 
 take his place as leader of the Conservatives, 
 and he was elected unanimously. But the 
 thoughtful saw in the change the beginning of 
 the end of the present Coalition. Mr. Bonar 
 Law was an accommodator and man of tact, 
 skilled to smooth over differences ; Mr. Chamber- 
 lain having once swallowed a poker, differences 
 under his regime tend to confirm themselves, 
 for his view of politics regards them as the 
 mechanical resultant in a parallelogram of 
 forces. Mr. Bonar Law was skilled at adapting 
 himself to the changing moods of the House ; 
 Mr. Chamberlain, though his formal set 
 speeches have dignity and sometimes a good 
 deal of power, is stiff and unadaptable; he 
 has political learning, but little mother-wit, 
 and on an issue suddenly presented to him, 
 he may be depended upon to combine the 
 maximum of opposition and to secure the 
 minimum of support. He has been for these 
 and other reasons not a good leader of the 
 House of Commons. Moreover, there is little 
 or no personal sympathy between him and Mr. 
 Lloyd George, and though on some questions 
 Ireland may be one his views are more liberal 
 than those of his predecessor, these intellectual 
 agreements are no substitute for the free 
 conflict of ideas which, between men whose
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 161 
 
 temperaments match, so often lead to good 
 team work. With some men you differ to 
 agree, or else must quarrel violently ; but with 
 men of Mr. Chamberlain's stamp you agree to 
 differ, always retaining the highest personal 
 esteem for them. 
 
 A reasonable man, simple and unaffected in 
 personal intercourse, a capable administrator, 
 an exceedingly effective speaker, especially 
 when he is roused Mr. Chamberlain has all 
 the qualities but one to command respect and 
 success. But he cannot fight a brother official ; 
 that power lacking, there are many offices that 
 would suit him, but the Treasury, alas, was an 
 obvious misfit. And it was another misfit 
 which disqualifies him for the position of 
 leader that at a time when the country was in 
 full revolt against being over-governed and 
 against officialdom good and evil alike, he should 
 be the best representative amongst politicians 
 of the Civil Service mind. 
 
 11
 
 SIR GORDON HEWART
 
 SIR GORDON HEWART.
 
 THE Attorney-General has not escaped 
 the suspicion that always attaches to 
 lawyers who are politicians, but it 
 would be juster to regard him as a politician 
 who is a lawyer. The first sort practise the 
 law for their conscience, and take to politics 
 as the only sort of lay preaching whose rewards 
 are not laid up in heaven. The second and 
 less numerous sort, to which Sir Gordon 
 He wart belongs, practise the law for its 
 rewards, and politics for the recreation and, if 
 possible, the approval of their conscience. 
 
 He was a politician before he was a lawyer, 
 and he must have written as many newspaper 
 articles before he took office as Mr. Churchill 
 since. He took to the law when he was no 
 longer quite young, for the sake of liberty and 
 fees, but though he got the fees, it is doubtful 
 whether he captured much liberty. The life 
 of a barrister is not, it has been said, a bed of 
 roses, for either it is all bed and no roses, or 
 if he succeeds, it is all roses and no bed. And 
 
 165
 
 166 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 becoming a law officer of the Crown does not 
 mend matters in that respect, for these much- 
 abused and strangely envied men do twice the 
 work for half the fees, and in addition have 
 politics thrown in as an extra shift. No man 
 can court politics and law quite impartially. 
 The bias to the one or the other must come 
 sooner or later, and in Sir Gordon Hewart's 
 case it seems to have come definitely towards 
 the law. 
 
 It is a pity from some points of view, for 
 he has political gifts that have not found full 
 expression in the Coalition. In his younger 
 days he used to plead for the cause of constitu- 
 tional reform in India, and liked his fling at 
 the Liberal Imperialists ; and in Manchester 
 they still talk of the masterly speeches in 
 which he presented the Free Trade case at a 
 by-election there. 
 
 One often hears his old political friends 
 deplore that no occasion has arisen in which a 
 scrupulously loyal member of the Government 
 (as he is) could have made an appeal on behalf 
 of wronged suffering or indulged the sympathy 
 with the underdog which is instinctive with a 
 Liberal. To these ardent souls his Attorney- 
 Generalship, of which an ex-Attorney-General 
 of great distinction said recently, that never 
 had the Crown been so well served in this
 
 SIR GORDON HEWART 167 
 
 office before, seems no better than a series of 
 appearances in behalf of Dora's drunks and 
 disorderlies, and he has certainly been unfortu- 
 nate in some of the legislation put under his care. 
 
 On the other hand, it is only fair to the 
 Government to add that Sir Gordon Hewart 
 might have been Home Secretary if he had 
 wished, and perhaps at one time Irish Secretary 
 too. He was right to decline both, for he is 
 rather too literal for Ireland, and too sceptical 
 for the Home Office. The War Office might 
 have suited him, for he has an excellent head 
 for business -he is one of the few men in the 
 Coalition Government whose administration of 
 his office is above criticism and the India 
 Office certainly would, for no one has a 
 keener sympathy with the cause of constitu- 
 tional reform or more dislike for the arrogance 
 of a race ascendancy. But these offices would 
 have taken him away from the law, and by 
 the time they presented themselves the law 
 had him firmly by the leg. 
 
 His faithfulness to the law was not altogether 
 to the taste of the Government, which per- 
 suaded him, when Lord Reading went to India, 
 to forgo his claims to the Lord Chief Justice- 
 ship, which everyone expected to be given 
 him, and to remain with them. The undoubted 
 regret of the English Bar when politics kept
 
 168 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 him is, it is thought, to be solaced by his 
 appointment later. He will be an ideal Lord 
 Chief, both for his mastery of the law, and for 
 the power of expressing it with the exactness 
 of a scholar and the dignity of a born orator. 
 Sir Gordon He wart has carried orderliness of 
 mind and the gift of style to the point of genius. 
 He has not the sonority of Mr. Asquith, but he 
 has greater subtlety, as sure a grasp of masses 
 of detail, equal tightness, and more plasticity 
 in argument. His speech is smooth and pure ; 
 the words fall unerringly into their place, not 
 with the somewhat shambling fluency of Lord 
 Haldane, but eyes right and shoulders back 
 like toy soldiers. Even his impromptu 
 speeches still manage to convey the same 
 impression of perfect prose, and, when he is 
 arguing, you are lost unless you dispute the 
 premises, for there is never a nick in the 
 smooth surface of the development. 
 
 These qualities are exceedingly useful in 
 politics, and the Government likes to bring 
 him in like a famous consultant, good bedside 
 manner and all, to their desperate cases. 
 There are two types of politicians. One type 
 has visions, trances, divination, anacolutha, 
 leaps, and to this type belong one or two great 
 men in a generation (Mr. Lloyd George him- 
 self, for example), and hundreds of misfits.
 
 SIR GORDON HEWART 169 
 
 The other type are exact and practical, dislike 
 " viewiness " unless it is well warmed by 
 experience, and will have their political bread 
 well baked and with a good crust. Sir Gordon 
 Hewart is of these last. It is readily under- 
 stood how invaluable such a man must be to 
 a Government like the Coalition. He speaks 
 seldom in the House, but his success has 
 latterly been so notable, that some have 
 even begun to think of him as a leader of a 
 party. Others see no more in it than an 
 example of the perfect lawyer with a gift of 
 style applying himself to the subject-matter 
 of politics. 
 
 But let it never be forgotten, when we 
 contrast the lawyer and the politician, that 
 the edifice of British liberties is raised on the 
 foundations of the common law, and that the 
 great classic charters of English political 
 liberty have no more passion and imagination 
 in them than a statement of claim. A man is 
 not necessarily lost to politics when he becomes 
 Lord Chief Justice, and there is an immense 
 mass of work crying out to be done on the 
 boundaries of law and politics. Someone 
 suggested recently that Sir Gordon Hewart 
 would be the man to carry out the work of 
 codification if this is ever seriously to be 
 undertaken in this country.
 
 170 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Sir Gordon Hewart, by reason of the sim- 
 plicity and straightforwardness of his political 
 views, is a good example of the Coalition 
 Liberal, and as such has been frequently made 
 a target of abuse by those to whom a Liberal 
 faith is not a compass to guide a man through 
 his political difficulties, but a line to be toed. 
 To him the war came as an even ruder shock 
 than to many others because, instead of con- 
 firming his diagnosis of politics, it seemed 
 to make havoc of much that he had 
 implicitly believed. To these men Coalition 
 presented itself first as a condition necessary 
 for winning the war (as it certainly was), and 
 secondly as a necessary stage in the develop- 
 ment of the Liberal faith itself. They believed 
 that the moment the faith hardened into 
 dogma it must die here, as it has all but died 
 abroad, and they thought that in a few years 
 a new Liberalism would emerge, including the 
 best elements of both parties and even possibly 
 a wing of the Labour men. It was because he 
 stood for this belief that Sir Gordon Hewart 
 went down to the Liberal meetings at Leaming- 
 ton last year and was in effect drummed out 
 of the party. 
 
 Whether his tactics were right or wrong, 
 time only can show, but his policy of wanting 
 a restatement of the Liberal faith has already
 
 SIR GORDON HEWART 171 
 
 been proved to be right. In fact, a great 
 Liberal reaction has begun in this country, and 
 the difficulty is that its pace has outstripped 
 the power of any political machinery to adapt 
 itself to the changes. But it is not a reaction 
 to the Liberal faith in its old forms. Under 
 what banner it will ultimately range itself no 
 one can say for certain. If under the banner 
 of the Independent Liberals, it will be because 
 they too have moved. On the other hand, it 
 may be under some new Coalition banner, 
 with Mr. Lloyd George or someone else leading. 
 The recent movement in English politics 
 towards a union of Coalition and Independent 
 Liberals has, very rightly, attracted much 
 attention, and if it matures will justify the 
 position that Liberals like Sir Gordon Hewart 
 have taken in the politics of the last five years. 
 Personalities apart, there is precious little 
 between the Coalition Liberals and their old 
 friends, who have paid them the compliment 
 of imitating their policy and reshaping the old 
 faith to new conditions. What a meeting 
 there may be some day of these flying tangents !
 
 LADY ASTOR
 
 LADY ASTOR.
 
 XII 
 LADY ASTOR 
 
 A the first woman Member of the 
 British House of Commons, Lady 
 Astor has already won a place in 
 history. Her place in the House itself is 
 less certain. On her first day, when she was 
 introduced by the Prime Minister and Mr. 
 Balfour, it looked (they say) for a fraction 
 of a second as though she would like to take 
 a seat on the front Government Bench, between 
 these two good friends. 1 Having avoided this 
 
 1 This ceremony of introduction is an awkward and even 
 a formidable ceremony. You stand with a sponsor on each 
 side of you, at the bar of the House, which is a brass plate 
 about 12 feet in front of the door, marking the place where 
 the formalities of the " floor " begin. The newly-elected 
 Member waits there until the Speaker calls him, and then 
 bows, if possible in time with his two sponsors. The three 
 then march half-way up the floor, if possible in alignment, 
 then halt, bow again, and then march up to the Mace, where 
 they bow for the third time, and the sponsors then leave 
 the new Member in charge of the Clerk, who administers the 
 oath, and makes him sign his name in a book. The House 
 always appreciates any little comicalities to which these 
 manoeuvres may give rise. The instinct of a man introduced 
 to an assembly of women in these circumstances would 
 undoubtedly be to sit down confusedly next to his two ascer- 
 tained friends. 
 
 175
 
 176 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 perilous place, she took the seat of Sir William 
 Joynson-Hicks, that gentleman being away in 
 Egypt, but on his return some time later, he 
 made a constitutional affair of it, and Lady 
 Astor had to take refuge on the Labour 
 Benches, where she sits somewhat vagrantly, 
 but usually under the lee of the portly Mr. 
 Will Thorne. The Labour men sit less on 
 their dignity, and she has good friends amongst 
 them, including Mr. J. H. Thomas ; and when 
 they differ it is with the utmost amiability. In 
 spite of her millions, it is noticeable that the 
 average working-man gets her woman's point of 
 viewmuch more quickly than the average middle- 
 class man. In Virginia Lady Astor belonged 
 to what would here be called the squirearchy. 
 But she was one of a big family, and they work 
 hard on the land in America. The squirearchy 
 of the Langhornes was more like what you will 
 find in Galway or Tipperary than in Sussex 
 or South Cheshire, only it was free from the 
 snobbery that is the besetting sin of Irish life. 
 She learned much in those early days which she 
 has never forgotten ; and her sympathy with 
 labour is quite free from affectation and in 
 certain directions very deep. 
 
 Her Parliamentary manners lack the intel- 
 lectual sexlessness of, say, women deputies in 
 Finland, nor do they imitate the studied
 
 LADY ASTOR 177 
 
 somnolence of the British male legislator, 
 who, when he wants to look the part, 
 crosses his legs, closes his eyes, and tilts his 
 hat (if he is wearing one) on to his nose. She 
 is restless and animated as she listens, and 
 approval or disapproval is shown in her face, 
 and sometimes signified sotto voce to her 
 neighbours. She has adopted a kind of Par- 
 liamentary uniform, consisting of a dark blue 
 skirt, a white blouse, and white gloves, which 
 she often wears about her wrists, leaving her 
 hands bare the better to handle papers. She 
 has acquired the Parliamentary habit of leaving 
 the House when bores are up, but not the 
 trick of asking questions which with her leave 
 the interrogative and acquire the hortatory or 
 reproachful mood, and get her ruled out of 
 order. She speaks rarely, and not attractively. 
 Her voice is, in its upper notes, a little harsh (a 
 common fault amongst fashionable women in 
 England), has one or two good deep notes, 
 but no intermediate tones. There are faint 
 traces of an American accent, and dropped final 
 g's, like flies in amber, show that she must have 
 entered English society about twenty years ago, 
 when the smart set boycotted this letter. She 
 pleads and coaxes (like a missionary to an 
 assembly of inebriates), but does not argue. 
 She has learned not to address her remarks to 
 
 12
 
 178 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 one Member, but to the Speaker, who, however, 
 is often visibly embarrassed by buttonholing 
 exhortations to combat the evils of strong drink. 
 On the other hand, there is sometimes an 
 original or graphic turn of phrase, and she is 
 good at a retort. Her subjects are the drink 
 question, and everything that concerns the 
 family life ; Plymouth, where her constituents 
 are all Drakes and Pilgrim Fathers ; and friendly 
 relations with the United States of America, on 
 behalf of which she never misses an opportu- 
 nity of putting in a word. But as a speaker she 
 frankly disappoints the House. She is clearly 
 not an intellectual woman, and her influence 
 in politics, which is rather greater than is 
 generally thought, is due to purely feminine 
 qualities. Conspicuous among these qualities 
 are mother wit and a ready tongue, simplicity, 
 naturalness, and the other qualities that make 
 a good electioneer. Electioneering, indeed, is 
 her strength outside the House, and her weak- 
 ness within it, for the House, like Royalty, does 
 not like being spoken to like a public meeting. 
 She has, too, the simple direct logic that 
 gets things done. It is one of the vanities 
 of men to deny the possession of logic 
 to women, but Shakespeare, who understood 
 women, knew better. Macbeth and Lady 
 Macbeth represent the typical antithesis of
 
 LADY ASTOR 179 
 
 man and woman where action is concerned. 
 The man is for ever balancing alternatives, 
 trying to make the best of both worlds, and 
 making ineffective compromises between 
 irreconcilable courses. With the woman the 
 transition from an opinion to a policy or an 
 act is much more direct ; it was Lady Macbeth 
 who said, "Give me the dagger." Lady Astor 
 is like that when she is denouncing the liquor 
 trade. It explains too (though in this case 
 there is no question of daggers) why she has 
 always had so great a dislike for Mr. Asquith 
 as a politician. Women, generally, have an 
 instinctive preference for extreme and logical 
 policies. If Lady Astor has seemed once or 
 twice of late to shake her head doubtfully over 
 her old political hero, the Prime Minister, it is 
 probably because, in his anxiety to keep the 
 Coalition together, he has conceded too much 
 to compromise and ambiguity. 
 
 The influence of enfranchised women on 
 political affairs is one of the chief elements of 
 doubt in modern English politics. They are 
 more tangential and less stable than the male 
 elector, and less under the control of the 
 party machine. The old fear that they would 
 vote as women in opposition to men has 
 turned out to be groundless, as sensible people 
 always prophesied that it would do ; but the
 
 180 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 masses of women voters are easily carried 
 away by an agitation, and when their sym- 
 pathies are once aroused, they have no party 
 ties and no old political traditions to hold 
 them back. They pass easily from one side 
 to another, and there is reason to think that 
 the remarkable turnover of votes in recent by- 
 elections, especially in the Home Counties, was 
 due in great measure to the women electors. 
 Varium et mutabile semper. They are certainly 
 not going to be the politically Conservative 
 force in the electorate that was once thought, 
 and their enfranchisement has undoubtedly 
 increased the power of the agitator (within 
 certain well-defined limits, however, for most 
 women are socially, though not politically, 
 Conservative). If these views be sound, the 
 change may still be for the better, for it is 
 possible even for the ship of State to have 
 too much ballast, and they are certainly no 
 argument against enfranchisement which, like 
 earlier enfranchisements of men, was given as 
 a right and not in expectation of the results, 
 good or evil, that might be expected to follow. 
 But they do increase the interest that Lady 
 Astor has as the first woman Member of 
 Parliament. 
 
 The real danger is the persistently personal 
 character of their political judgments. Alike
 
 LADY ASTOR 181 
 
 in its remorseless logic and in its personal 
 barb, the white feather crusade in the war was 
 typical of women's psychology in politics. But 
 it is better that the first woman Member 
 should be a typically feminine woman without 
 any marked political abilities, and with 
 interests that run entirely in the direction of 
 social conservatism. There are women in 
 politics who, whether as speakers or as thinkers 
 on politics, are far better than most men at 
 their own game ; the suffrage movement threw 
 up dozens of such women. Had the first 
 woman M.P. been of this type, her contribu- 
 tion to Parliamentary politics might have been 
 more momentous, but it would hardly have 
 been so distinctive as Lady Astor's. She would 
 have added no new idiom to our Parliamentary 
 politics ; she would merely have exaggerated 
 the bias that masculine politics have acquired 
 through centuries of Parliamentary govern- 
 ment, might have terrified the average man by 
 her ability and perhaps produced a reaction 
 against women candidatures. But, though Lady 
 Astor's Parliamentary achievement has not been 
 great, it has served to indicate the most impor- 
 tant service that women may render in Parlia- 
 ment. The most useful women Members, at 
 any rate for the present, are not those who 
 can discuss men's politics most like men, but
 
 182 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 those who can introduce new subjects that 
 men have overlooked, and new points of view 
 not even suspected. Lady Astor has made 
 herself the representative of women's interest 
 in home life, rather than in public life. When 
 she talks temperance reform, it is not merely 
 or so much because it will contribute to the 
 communal welfare, but because she regards 
 intemperance as an organised commercial fraud 
 upon the home. This same inspiration runs 
 through many of her speeches, and not on 
 temperance alone ; for in her zeal for education 
 there is the same womanly zeal for the welfare 
 of the young and the increase of efficiency. 
 She may talk about the general welfare, but 
 really it is the woman's interest in the welfare 
 of the individual that animates her. She has 
 the woman's interest, too, in health and nursing, 
 as she showed by turning her beautiful house 
 at Cliveden, up the Thames, into a hospital 
 during the war, and she has the greatest con- 
 tempt for those anti-wasters who attack the 
 work of the health and the education depart- 
 ments without distinguishing between the waste 
 of inefficient administration and the sound 
 national investment of more knowledge and 
 better health. She has courage and her 
 instincts are usually sound. But one serious 
 mistake that she made in opposing desertion
 
 LADY ASTOR 183 
 
 as a ground for divorce, gave a handle to much 
 misrepresentation. Her first marriage was an 
 unhappy one, and she had obtained a judicial 
 separation for desertion which later became a 
 decree of divorce. She was reproached with 
 having obtained a collusive divorce on the 
 ground of desertion, and for denying to 
 working-women the freedom of divorce that 
 she had claimed for herself. Her answer was 
 complete, though somewhat technical, but the 
 attacks undoubtedly injured her, not only with 
 the vulgar, but even with some who, though 
 not vulgar, did not know her. The offend- 
 ing speech was an example of her impulsive 
 but ill-considered regard for the unit of the 
 family. 
 
 Lady Astor' s real influence in politics is 
 exercised outside the House as a hostess. 
 The Astor salon in London, and still more her 
 house-parties in the country, are the occasion 
 of many meetings between men of different 
 parties, and undoubtedly did much to make 
 Coalition easier. Lady Astor is not an 
 intriguer, nor are her own political views 
 either deep or subtle. But she has a keen eye 
 for ability, and it is her delight to know able 
 men and to make them know each other. Mr. 
 Balfour and Mr. Lloyd George were of her 
 circle, and the esteem which these two men,
 
 184 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 temperamentally so different, undoubtedly 
 have for each other may have originated or 
 been confirmed at her parties. She has the 
 woman's gift of realism when she is meeting 
 men and not dealing with principles, and she is 
 an ideal hostess, who loves to be kind to 
 merit while it is still obscure.
 
 MR. J. H. THOMAS
 
 MR. J. H. THOMAS.
 
 XIII 
 MR . J. H. THOMAS 
 
 MR. J. H. THOMAS, at a small con- 
 ference, was once whirling wild 
 words round his head like a battle- 
 axe, when the Prime Minister interrupted him. 
 " That's all very well for the heathen, Mr. 
 Thomas," he said, " but remember that I'm a 
 Welshman too." 
 
 To be a Welshman usually means that you 
 have the gift of splitting yourself up into 
 several personalities and speaking out of each 
 in turn as though it were your whole self. 
 The Anglo-Saxon, who has not this gift, is apt 
 to call it by hard names, and thereby often 
 does his brother Celt an injustice. Mr. Thomas 
 has suffered from time to time in this way, but 
 in reality he has a simple nature, and his ends 
 are quite straightforward and sincere. Only, 
 it must be remembered that whereas the mere 
 Englishman is inflexional in his mental pro- 
 cesses, the Celt is agglutinative. The one 
 reaches his conclusions, like a weak verb, 
 
 187
 
 188 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 without altering his radical vowel, the other 
 passes through half a dozen stems before 
 arriving at his final meaning. 
 
 Mr. Thomas has probably a stronger hold 
 over the railwaymen than any other Labour 
 leader has over his union. He began work as 
 an errand-boy at nine years of age, became an 
 engine-cleaner, and later an engine-driver, and 
 according to the Great Western Railway Com- 
 pany a very good one. He entered national 
 politics by way of the municipal affairs of Swin- 
 don, and by his remarkable work in organising 
 the various railway trade unions into a single 
 amalgamation. He is a great believer in 
 organisation by industry and not by the multi- 
 farious trades contained within the industry, 
 and much of Mr. Thomas's reputation in his 
 union is due to the accumulation of thousands 
 of unrecorded feats of tact in smoothing over 
 sectional jealousies. This sort of thing grows 
 the man as the madrepores grow the coral 
 islands, and the recurring concept of Mr. 
 Thomas is of one wiping his brows after some 
 prodigy of tactful persuasion and murmuring, 
 "Oh, what a time I have had with my men ! " 
 Many stories are told of the joint operations 
 of the distinguished Mr. Spenlow Thomas and 
 plain Mr. Thomas Jorkins, but they are very 
 likely untrue, and if they were true they none
 
 MR. J. H. THOMAS 189 
 
 of them affect the essential integrity of the 
 firm. All some men 
 
 have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool, 
 
 and one seems to remember reading in Jefferies 
 somewhere that if you're fishing and want to 
 catch your fish, you must not throw a straight 
 shadow over the water ; a crooked shadow 
 does not matter so much, because it may be 
 mistaken for an overhanging bough. Mr. 
 Thomas throws a crooked shadow. But then 
 what a pool ! And what big, shy, and wily 
 fish ! The man himself is straight. 
 
 Mr. Thomas is not a bookish man, though he 
 can write forcibly, and almost his only school 
 has been in public affairs. Such men labour 
 under disadvantages, of which the chief is that 
 because you are always learning, and therefore 
 changing your mind, you are supposed to have 
 no mind of your own, or, worse still, to have 
 two minds, which you use alternatively as 
 convenience dictates. Liter a scripta manet, 
 and so, both for good and evil, does a principle 
 which comes out of a book, and has been 
 diligently conned in youth. But half the stern, 
 immutable principles that are so much admired 
 are really stiff -jointedness, a sort of rheumatism 
 caught in early education which those men 
 whose schooling has been in mature life escape.
 
 190 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Mr. Thomas has no fixed philosophy of politics 
 in the academic or scholastic sense ; nor is 
 there a commoner mistake made in judging the 
 great leaders of trade union action in England 
 than that of imagining them to be working 
 out everything according to some theory. 
 They may do that in Germany or Russia, 
 but not here, where they are nearly to a man 
 opportunists and tacticians whose aims depend 
 not only or even so much on their precon- 
 ceived views, but on what the other people do. 
 It is a vice of class consciousness in the 
 bourgeoisie that it regards Labour policy as 
 something outside its own influence, whereas 
 in fact they have as much to do with shaping 
 it as the Labour leaders themselves. If they 
 are class-conscious, so will the proletariat be ; 
 if, on the other hand, they understand and 
 respond, they will meet with response, and 
 politics will be a subtle chemistry of human 
 nature, as they should be, and not the conflict 
 of fixed mechanical forces. That is the nearest 
 approach to a general idea for which men like 
 Mr. Thomas stand. 
 
 A man who has made a national anything is 
 in danger of becoming a nationaliser, and Mr. 
 Thomas, if not a theoretical Socialist, is a 
 Socialist with regard to railways. But he is 
 quite definitely Fabian and not revolutionary,
 
 MR. J. H. THOMAS 191 
 
 and he dislikes strikes. His idea of a Labour 
 leader is that he should be able to get what 
 he wants without a strike. He does not 
 inflame, he does not bluff, and though his own 
 presentation of himself as one who is always 
 wrestling with beasts at Ephesus is overdrawn, 
 he will oppose the majority when opposition 
 has a fair chance of success ; he will stand up 
 for what he considers the best policy for the 
 country, provided that the cost be not too 
 great ; and he will leap down from the fence 
 on the dry side if the alternative is falling into 
 the last ditch. He is a wise rather than a 
 heroic counsellor, but it is the better part 
 both for the country and for his union, as 
 recent events have shown. 
 
 Mr. Thomas at his best is an impressive 
 speaker, in spite of his Cockney isms. He 
 always sees an issue in a big sort of way, and 
 when he is seen quaking and trembling at the 
 approaching last day, it is not from affectation, 
 but from the natural man's terror and rever- 
 ential awe before the cosmic processes. His 
 mind is exceedingly quick : he misses no point 
 in an argument ; he negotiates with art, and 
 on occasion with directness. When a problem 
 is first propounded, he sidles and minces up to 
 it like a stoat hunting a rabbit ; but he ends 
 by biting once and no more. With every
 
 192 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 temptation to become as one of the bourgeoisie, 
 he is loyal to his class, and his friendships out- 
 side of it do not affect the direction of his 
 policy, though they may be responsible for 
 some of its twists. His ambition is to go 
 down to history as the skilful steersman through 
 dangerous currents into still waters. The men 
 who steer do not row at the same time, and 
 there is always the danger of their being swept 
 away. If Mr. Thomas is swept away, it will 
 be the fault of the middle classes as much as 
 of his own, and it will be against his wish and 
 inclination. 
 
 He hates political abstractions, and, while 
 it would be unfair to say that his ideas of 
 progress are purely material, his real ambition 
 for the proletariat, if analysed, is that it 
 should cease to be an aggregation of hands and 
 should acquire some of the bourgeoisie's control 
 of its labour and ownership of its profits. His 
 Socialism leans to the guild variety rather 
 than to that of the omnipotent State. At 
 heart a petit bourgeois, he is one of the proofs 
 that a man may be that and still not cease to 
 be a loyal member of the proletariat.
 
 LORD BIRKENHEAD 
 
 13
 
 1 
 
 LORD BlRKENHEAD. 
 
 [Barratt
 
 XIV 
 LORD BIRKENHEAD 
 
 IT is a solemn thought that if Lord Birken- 
 head had remained a don at Oxford he 
 might have been at least a dean of his 
 college by this time, with a pallor and a slight 
 stoop. What is there in politics and the 
 practice of the common law that keeps men 
 young, so that the occupant of the Woolsack 
 and the Keeper of the King's conscience can 
 carry the roses of youth into years to which 
 business and learning can offer only the 
 bouquet of tired lilies ? For Lord Birkenhead 
 is not alone amongst politician-lawyers in 
 thriving on irregular hours, scant sleep, hard 
 work, and cooked air. There are dozens like 
 him, only less so. What works the miracle is 
 the athletics of the game. There is no success 
 in politics or the law without high spirits, and 
 both are so like the rough-and-tumble of foot- 
 ball that the constant intellectual exercise in 
 them has the same effect as the real game, 
 except that it does not make them so sleepy. 
 So true is it that the mind calls the tune for 
 the body. 
 
 195
 
 196 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Mr. F. E. Smith (as he was) always played 
 politics and law like a footballer. In his early 
 days of opposition it was the fashion amongst 
 Liberals to think of him as a muddied oaf 
 in the scrum, and to contrast his superficial 
 invective with the solid ratiocination of Sir 
 John Simon. The two were together at 
 Wadham in the early nineties in fact they 
 were Wadham with some assistance from 
 Mr. C. B. Fry and Mr. Francis W. Hirst. 
 The two used to be contrasted like the cele- 
 brated " Popular Educator " advertisement of 
 The Boy : What will become of him ? and Mr. 
 Simon was always on the top line ascending 
 higher and higher in fame, and Mr. Smith on 
 the bottom line as regularly descending in 
 discredit. The comparison did an injustice to 
 both, but especially to Mr. Smith, who is 
 essentially a serious man in the French if not 
 in the English sense of the word. He had to 
 work hard at Oxford, for his father died young 
 after a career as a private of adventure in the 
 army and a successful but all too short career 
 at the Liverpool Bar ; and when Mr. F. E. 
 Smith himself went to the Bar there was no 
 slacking, for he married young. A great 
 lawyer he certainly is not, though latterly he 
 has seemed to be in some danger of becoming 
 one, and one can well imagine that his fondness
 
 LORD BIRKENHEAD 197 
 
 for short cuts may often have been a trial. 
 But he was not a Vinerian scholar for nothing. 
 No Lord Chancellor ever had a surer grasp of 
 the main principles of law than he, and, what 
 is not, perhaps, so well known, no one ever 
 had greater power of work hard, rapid, and 
 at the same time sure. In law, as in politics, 
 he has falsified the predictions of the old fogies. 
 Some people do their work, as the Pharisees 
 did their praying, in public so that all men 
 may see, and they have their reward in being 
 taken very seriously. Mr. Smith in this matter 
 of work was still is as Lord Birkenhead 
 one of the Sadducees. Work with him is a 
 disagreeable necessity, the mere kitchen and 
 back apartments of the palace that is life, 
 not to be explored, still less exhibited. But 
 the work gets done, which is the main thing, 
 and when it is done, secretly and by stealth, 
 as a duke might keep a toffee-shop to add to 
 his income, the real business of a free man, 
 which is to enjoy the phantasmagoria of life 
 and power, begins. Lord Birkenhead has 
 always enjoyed the magnificences, like his dis- 
 tinguished predecessor on the Woolsack, Car- 
 dinal Wolsey. The apocryphal story of how 
 Mr. Justice Bigham, as he then was, pretended 
 to mistake the Mersey Dock and Harbour 
 Board's new buildings for Mr. F. E. Smith's
 
 198 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 chambers dates back to his days as a junior in 
 Liverpool ; and after that beginning 3,500 
 for a Lord Chancellor's bathroom is not much to 
 make a song about. Aristotle, it will be remem- 
 bered, puts magnificence amongst the virtues. 
 
 Lord Birkenhead comes from Lancashire, but 
 from West not East Lancashire, and it makes all 
 the difference. East Lancashire goes with the 
 West Riding of Yorkshire, West Lancashire 
 goes with Belfast ; and between the two Lanca- 
 shires you could until quite recently find bits 
 of agricultural country as feudal as Shropshire. 
 In spite of the connection of trade, the separa- 
 tion both of history and of race between the 
 two is complete, and it explains the difference 
 in their political characters and between the 
 politics of Lord Birkenhead and Sir John 
 Simon, who is in many respects a typical 
 Manchester Liberal. Scratch an East Lanca- 
 shire Liberal, and you will find principles as 
 plentiful and unnutritious as unripe black- 
 berries, mixed with memories of Cobden and 
 of the hungry forties, and of the wicked early 
 days of the cotton trade, when you were either 
 a tyrannical exploiter or a low-spirited wage- 
 slave. Scratch a Liverpool Conservative, and 
 you will probably find a Belfast democrat. The 
 key to Lord Birkenhead's politics is the fact 
 that Liverpool is really a suburb of Ulster, with
 
 LORD BIRKENHEAD 199 
 
 the Irish Sea flowing between them like a wide 
 river. The same may be said, though with less 
 truth, of Glasgow, and that explains why Mr. 
 Bonar Law allied the Conservative Party so 
 closely with the Ulster malcontents before the 
 war, and why Lord Birkenhead was Galloper 
 Smith. It explains the Church and State 
 paraphernalia with which Liverpool dowered 
 Lord Birkenhead along with his practice. But 
 it explains too how Lord Birkenhead is so 
 good a democrat a better democrat, surely, 
 than his Liberal anti-type, Sir John Simon. 
 
 Lord Birkenhead used often to be reproached 
 for the abuse and low argumentative power of 
 his speeches, but when he chooses no man can 
 argue better. His first speech in Parliament, 
 delivered in the first days of Conservative 
 depression after the heavy defeats of 1906, is 
 often said to have been the most successful 
 maiden speech ever made in the Commons ; but 
 in fact it was neither better nor worse than 
 half a dozen speeches made every year in the 
 Oxford Union. It was the circumstance of the 
 speech that made it so effective ; and nothing 
 more surely proves the essential balance and 
 sanity of Lord Birkenhead' s mind than that he 
 recognised that fact in the first flush of success, 
 and when next he spoke was very careful to do 
 something entirely different, and to show that
 
 200 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 he, too, could argue powerfully on a serious 
 and dry topic. The subject was the exemption 
 of private property at sea from capture in time 
 of war, which he supported. His virulence, his 
 invective, and his affectation of the slapdash 
 are not indiscretions, but calculated. His view, 
 no doubt, is that people do not want argument 
 at a public meeting, but to be told and 
 amused, and though he must often have under- 
 rated the intelligence of his audiences, it is 
 undoubtedly true that a public meeting, 
 especially at election time, is about the worst 
 medium possible for a serious argument. Lord 
 Birkenhead takes dangerous liberties with 
 forms, and he must be the one Lord Chancellor 
 who has dared to be off-hand and casual on 
 the Woolsack. Perhaps that manner is cal- 
 culated too. Oddly enough, when he writes 
 he is serious almost to stolidity, unduly em- 
 barrassed, perhaps, by the truth, of which his 
 practice at the Bar must have supplied him 
 with many awful illustrations, that litera 
 scripta manet. 
 
 The office of Lord Chancellor used to be 
 regarded as far too grave and reverend for 
 party politics in the ordinary sense. Sir John 
 Simon declined the office to become Home 
 Secretary, the theory being that when a man 
 becomes Lord Chancellor he is done for as far
 
 LORD BIRKENHEAD 201 
 
 as supreme political power is concerned. There 
 is no reason why that should be so, and one 
 would be much surprised if Lord Birkenhead 
 intended it to be so. On the contrary, it is 
 said with what truth one does not know- 
 that when he took the Lord Chancellorship it 
 was on the distinct understanding that the 
 House of Lords should be reformed. He has 
 certainly never acted as though he regarded 
 his office as in any degree analogous to that of 
 the Speaker of the House of Commons. His 
 interventions in debate are frequent and 
 vigorous ; he is the real leader of the House ; 
 and in a reformed House his power in politics 
 would be immense, almost rivalling that of a 
 Prime Minister in the Commons. His speeches 
 in the Lords have been better than any that he 
 made in the Commons, and, paradoxically, 
 have had more genuine passion. A speech of 
 his on the reform of the law of divorce, in 
 which he challenged the idea of marriage as a 
 mere ecclesiastical sacrament, glowed with con- 
 viction, like a fire challenging red against the 
 white lawn of the Bishops ; and his speech on 
 the second reading of the Home Rule Bill, 
 though less passionate, was worthy of its 
 association with Lord Grey's. 
 
 Intellectually honest and impatient of the 
 pretentious platitude that abounds even in
 
 202 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 the Lords, most intellectual of assemblies, 
 simple in exposition, humorous even to the 
 grotesque in illustration, direct and candid in 
 argument, master of the gibe that shrivels an 
 enemy and enheartens friends gifts much 
 less than these have sufficed Prime Ministers in 
 the past. He is a convinced Coalitionist, but 
 he shares the opinion of those who hold that 
 the present Government is not the only or the 
 final form that Coalition can take. He is a 
 close personal and political friend of Mr. 
 Winston Churchill, and the two are credited 
 with many schemes for the remodelling of 
 politics. In familiar intercourse of this kind, 
 the boundaries between mere idle speculation 
 and actual plotting are somewhat hard to 
 define, and rumour has from time to time made 
 itself very busy with their political ambitions. 
 But Lord Birkenhead's ambition is more subtle 
 than that of becoming Prime Minister. It is 
 to make himself master of a new House of 
 Lords, capable after reform of acting as 
 authoritative censor of both political parties, 
 to use it as the instrument of Tory democracy, 
 as Lord Randolph Churchill failed to do with 
 the Commons, and to best the platform of 
 demagogy of which his early political career 
 was a half-conscious satire, by a progressive 
 statesmanship of the Woolsack,
 
 LORD DERBY
 
 [C.N.A. 
 
 LORD DERBY.
 
 THE Derby family is the most powerful 
 territorial influence left in England. 
 There is usually a Stanley Member for 
 Preston ; Knowsley, the family's big house, is 
 almost a suburb of Liverpool ; Bootle is theirs, 
 and a great deal of land on the north side of 
 Manchester ; they were once Kings in Man, 
 and all over South Lancashire the Derby name 
 is much affected by public-houses for their 
 signboards and by fond mothers for their 
 first-born. In London the Grosvenors and 
 Russells count for nothing among the electors, 
 but let no one suppose that the Derby family 
 influence in Lancashire is the feudalism that 
 still lingers on in South Cheshire and Shrop- 
 shire. It is mainly urban and expresses itself 
 as a purely political rather than a social force. 
 It is the irritant within the oyster round which 
 the pearls of Lancashire Conservatism grow. 
 It was the great Earl of Derby who was Prime 
 Minister when Disraeli brought in and carried 
 the Reform Bill to which the industrial towns 
 
 205
 
 206 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 owe most of their votes. He described it as 
 " a leap in the dark," but he was faithful to 
 the policy, and he has been justified. The 
 Conservative working-man is still a great force 
 in English politics, especially in the North. 
 Disraeli discovered him, the Derbys adopted 
 him, and feudalism, driven out by the front 
 door in the industrial north, came in again by 
 the back door, disguised. 
 
 A seventeenth Earl of Derby has great 
 advantages apart from those conferred by 
 personal ability. In a venal world it is the 
 greatest of assets that you cannot be bought, 
 and too obvious a cleverness would only mar 
 the reputation for bluff straightforward John 
 Bullishness which you can have for a few 
 impulsive indiscretions and confirm by generous 
 apology. Lord Derby in a Lords debate 
 during the war threw doubt on the patriotism 
 of Lord Ribblesdale. The insult, and the 
 apology for it afterwards, were both so hand- 
 some that together they enhanced a reputation. 
 A man is forgiven for not always meaning what 
 he says if he is thought always to say what he 
 means. A seventeenth earl who gets that 
 character, and also has ambition, starts political 
 life with an enviable capital. 
 
 It is now abundantly clear that Lord Derby 
 has political ambition. In 1911, when he was
 
 LORD DERBY 207 
 
 distributing prizes at a technical school in 
 Nelson, he told the boys how important it was 
 to have an aim in life. He himself had started 
 with two ambitions to win the Derby, and be 
 Prime Minister. Lord Rosebery said it before 
 him, but it was not the less true on that 
 account. He had run second in the Derby, 
 and he had been Lord Mayor of Liverpool so 
 far, but he told them he had not done trying 
 for the others yet. It is a Lancashire habit, 
 when you want to say a thing without com- 
 mitting yourself to it, to say it jestingly, and 
 to take these observations literally may not be 
 quite playing the game. Still there are many 
 things more unlikely than that Lord Derby 
 is still hopeful of winning the Derby, and even 
 of becoming Prime Minister. 
 
 His political career, though intermittent, has 
 not been by any means undistinguished. At 
 the Post Office he negotiated the agreement for 
 the purchase of the National Telephone Com- 
 pany's undertaking ; also he called the postal 
 servants " bloodsuckers." The first showed 
 the buoyant hopefulness of his temperament, 
 the second his courage. He had previously 
 been Chief Press Censor to Lord Roberts in 
 South Africa, another example of courage, and 
 he was later private secretary to Lord Roberts, 
 whose views on compulsory military service he
 
 208 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 shared. In the Great War he was appointed 
 Director of Recruiting at a time when it was 
 obvious that we should want all our man- 
 power, and, looking back, everyone can now 
 see that if conscription had to come it would 
 have been better if we had adopted it early 
 and openly (as they did in America) instead 
 of slipping into it backwards as we did. The 
 Derby Scheme was the passage in his life that 
 was least like Lord Derby ; it was tactful when 
 bluntness would have been not only more in 
 character, but more helpful ; it was com- 
 promising when no compromise was possible, 
 apologetic when no apology was needed. No 
 one can combine the businesses of doctor and 
 undertaker without exciting comment, and 
 though Lord Derby honestly did his best by 
 the voluntary system, it was the undertaker 
 who won. Later in the war Lord Derby 
 became British Ambassador in Paris, and the 
 French people like him and he them. He 
 could have had office in the Coalition Govern- 
 ment, but declined. 
 
 Lord Derby came home from France not 
 because he wanted to leave Paris, but, as he 
 put it, " to take up again the manifold work 
 and interests that I have in this country." 
 By that he probably meant to look after the 
 fortunes of the Conservative Party. Lord
 
 LORD DERBY 209 
 
 Derby believes in Coalition, but it must be 
 Coalition inside his party, and when he came 
 back from Paris it was to take steps so that 
 his party should digest the Coalition, not the 
 Coalition it. The Liberal wing of the Coalition 
 have frequently accused Mr. Bonar Law of 
 clipping the wings of Mr. Lloyd George's 
 Radicalism. Lord Derby is one of the 
 Coalitionists who think that Mr. Bonar Law 
 has conceded too much of the essence of Con- 
 servatism to his alliance with Mr. Lloyd 
 George. He was a rebel against the conquest of 
 the Conservative Party by the ideas of Joseph 
 Chamberlain, and now that they have fallen 
 into disrepute, would like to enthrone a new 
 Tory democracy on the throne vacated by the 
 Cecils. He is the antipole to those Coalition- 
 ists who look forward to a transfer, some time 
 or other, of its goodwill to a new Liberal 
 Party. Whether it is called Liberal, or 
 National Democratic, or Centre, is a mere 
 detail to these people ; the point is that it 
 shall be Liberal in inspiration and shall take 
 over as many Conservatives .as can be 
 managed. 
 
 Conversely with Lord Derby the point is 
 
 that it shall be Conservative in inspiration and 
 
 bring over as many Liberals as like to come. 
 
 He recognises the need of his party for new 
 
 14
 
 210 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 blood, and he has a very sincere admiration 
 for Mr. Lloyd George. " Have we not taken 
 Mr. Lloyd George in ? " he asked not long 
 ago, " or " (a characteristic trick, this, of 
 buttoning his foil with a jest) " has he taken 
 us in ? " 
 
 Lord Derby is not so sure, and his uncertainty 
 explains why he has come back to England. 
 " There are the two Cecils," one can imagine 
 him saying on his way back, " gone over to 
 the Liberals and the Front Opposition Bench, 
 Balfour diffusing blessings out of the sunset, 
 Bonar Law and all the bright new planets of 
 the Conservative Party revolving in the Lloyd 
 George orbit, Chamberlain unpopular, Long 
 gone, Sutherland organising Liberal Coalition 
 forces so as to negotiate with us on equal terms ! 
 Time someone came back to look after things. 
 So here am I, Rupert of honest party strife, 
 autochthonous but progressive Tory, with keys 
 to the mind of Lancashire, and everything 
 handsome about me." It is a piquant situa- 
 tion, and one that will provide much of the 
 interest in the next evolution of our domestic 
 parties. 
 
 It cannot be said that the return of Lord 
 Derby has been without effect. The speech of 
 the Prime Minister about the Labour Party 
 coincided with the pre-Sessional rumours of
 
 LORD DERBY 211 
 
 Conservative disgruntlement, and may have 
 had no connection with Lord Derby's return. 
 But the Tory revolt of the spring, quelled by 
 Mr. Bonar Law at the time, revived in the 
 summer, and this time there was no doubt that 
 Lord Derby was at the back of it. On two or 
 three issues of policy, Lord Derby has taken a 
 strong line. He knows Lancashire, which is 
 nervous about all interferences with fiscal 
 policy, and he is very anxious that the Con- 
 servative Party should not be wagged by its 
 Protectionist zealots. He it was who got the 
 taxation of food thrown out of the official 
 policy of the Unionist Party, and it was at a 
 breakfast at his house that the compromises 
 were arranged which made it possible for some 
 Lancashire Free Traders, Liberal and Con- 
 servative, to support or, at any rate, to shrug 
 their shoulders at the Safeguarding of Industries 
 Bill. Secondly, he does not want all the 
 discredit of Irish coercion to be put on the 
 Conservatives and all the credit of a settlement 
 on the Liberal Coalitionists, and his visit to 
 Dublin as " Mr. Edwards," if it did nothing 
 else, at any rate pegged out a claim for 
 prestige in the event of Ulster and Sinn 
 Fein reconciling their differences. Lastly, 
 and more important, Lord Derby is for an 
 alliance with France, and if there is a split
 
 212 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 between him and the Prime Minister, it 
 may be on that score. With all his bluffness 
 he has a very shrewd sense of party tactics. 
 He is watching and he is a man to be 
 watched.
 
 MR. BRACE 
 AND OTHERS
 
 [Farringdon Photo Co. 
 
 MR. WILLIAM BRACE.
 
 XVI 
 MR. BRACE AND OTHERS 
 
 THE dour Mr. Adamson, impressivist 
 Mr. Thomas, Mr. Clynes the earnest, 
 and Mr. Arthur Henderson, debonair 
 and styled in manner, are only some of the 
 Labour men on the Front Opposition Bench. 
 Two of the best have gone Mr. Will Crooks 
 very infirm of late, silent but characterful 
 into retirement, 1 and Mr. Brace into the 
 Ministry of Mines. 
 
 Mr. Brace had much the best Parliamentary 
 manner of them all. Ex-Guardsman and ex- 
 hewer, beautiful in the curl alike of his mous- 
 taches and his sentences, he is a real strategist 
 in argument, and has a vigorous and indepen- 
 dent mind. His speech on the coal strike in 
 1920 was one of the cleverest things ever done 
 in the Commons, and was quite sensibly, as 
 one heard it, making history. His departure 
 is a great loss to the debating power of the 
 Labour benches, and one is tempted to wish 
 that Mr. Hartshorn, also a man of marked 
 
 1 Mr. Crooks has since died. 
 215
 
 216 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 ability, but of a different kind that might have 
 excelled in administration, could have gone to 
 the Ministry of Mines and Mr. Brace stayed in 
 the House. Deans have been heard to com- 
 plain of the competition of the working-classes 
 in schools and professions. But how much 
 bitterer and juster the complaint of the work- 
 ing-classes of the wholesale pillage of their 
 talents. It is a modern illustration to the 
 story of the tyrant and the tall poppies. 
 
 The Labour men badly need a real leader, 
 and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald (whose return 
 is constantly postponed) is the type of man 
 that the party needs for its Parliamentary 
 efficiency, though perhaps not for its political 
 progress in the country. If Mr. Adamson, the 
 present leader, were a duke, no one would 
 listen to him at all, and it saddens one to think 
 of Jaures in France and Vandervelde in Bel- 
 gium, and then to have to sit down to Mr. 
 Adamson's plate of thick porridge there 
 always seems such a lot of it. The Labour 
 Party, at a great crisis in its history like this, 
 should not do these things. 1 
 
 Mr. Clynes is a man of a very different type. 
 Obviously of Manchester, he has a close and 
 intimate style of argument and he is one of the 
 few Labour Members Mr. William Graham, 
 
 1 Mr. Adamson has been succeeded as leader by Mr. Clynes.
 
 MR. BRACE AND OTHERS 217 
 
 not yet of the Front Bench, is another who 
 can put themselves at another point of view 
 than his own, which is the beginning of per- 
 suasion. Always thoughtful and sure of a 
 good audience, he lacks strength, and has not 
 the overbearing quality of a leader. Mr. 
 Henderson, again, strikes one, with his pleasant 
 manner and agreeable fluency, as the sort of 
 man who is good except at a pinch. Mr. 
 Thomas is of the confidential, mysterious, and 
 accommodating type, and gives one the impres- 
 sion that he only drops his h's to disarm the 
 suspicions of the proletariat. But he is un- 
 doubtedly a man who can conceive and hold a 
 big idea and give it, on occasion, strong and 
 appropriate expression. Nor should one forget 
 Mr. Tom Shaw, who also speaks from the 
 Front Bench, and much too rarely. 
 
 What is wrong with the Labour Party ? 
 When one has to catalogue its men in this way, 
 and sees so much to interest and like without 
 finding The Man, it is a sign that the party has 
 not found itself, and that its policy is still only 
 tentative and dissipated with tendencies. The 
 superficial fault is that most of it has still to 
 master the science of Parliamentary procedure. 
 The number of effectives in the Irish Nationalist 
 Party is three, or perhaps four, but they can 
 manage to get a debate about Ireland two or
 
 218 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 three times a week, usually against the will of 
 the vast majority, and there is no end to the 
 irrelevancies that they make relevant and to 
 the runs they steal. Hardly a single Labour 
 Member has developed the art, although their 
 subject, one would have thought from the 
 number and complication of its details, ought 
 to be inexhaustible in its opportunities. 
 
 One explanation is that the deep and close 
 study of the rules of Parliament is a tradition 
 that has come down from ParnelFs day, and 
 that the Labour men are still amateurs at the 
 game, throwing away opportunities wholesale. 
 The party certainly wants a coach, preferably 
 an Irishman ; and if we could only get Home 
 Rule working in Ireland we should get Irishmen 
 here, not as Catholics and Protestants, or 
 Nationalists and Unionists, but as Tories, 
 Liberals, and Labour men, to the great gain of 
 all three parties, but especially of the last. For 
 the Irishman has undoubtedly a racial gift for 
 Parliamentary politics. It must be remem- 
 bered, in fairness to the Labour men, that the 
 game is played with words, and that the 
 normal training of the bourgeoisie is in words 
 and of the working-classes in things. You 
 hear good casual gibes and retorts from the 
 Labour benches, and sometimes a good set 
 speech, though it tends to sound like an essay.
 
 MR. BRACE AND OTHERS 219 
 
 But the rapid cut-and-thrust of argument, the 
 exploitation of a mistake made by the other 
 side, the clever adaptation of an argument to 
 the changes of mood and situation everything, 
 in fact, that makes the soul of a debate in 
 these matters the Labour Party is, as a rule, 
 quite helpless. You hear the clank of the 
 chains as they talk, and against their nimbler 
 antagonists they think of the appropriate 
 repartee four or five sentences too late. 
 
 It is not lack of ability, as is often said, for 
 though there are no men among them of more 
 than ordinary stature, they are not below the 
 average. What is wrong, and responsible 
 most of all for their poor show as debaters, is 
 their lack, or confusion, of ideas which, in 
 Labour politics, as in most other things, is 
 due to a lack of liberty. They have got hold 
 of a theory of State Socialism which is not 
 only shallow, but is hopelessly out of tune 
 both with the facts and with the sentiment of 
 the time. The supremacy of the idea of State 
 Socialism in Labour politics passed with the 
 defeat of Germany, for it means multiplication 
 of officials who are hated, growth of expendi- 
 ture which is undermining the basis of industry, 
 and destruction of individual initiative. 
 
 The remarkable arrest in the prestige of the 
 Labour Party is due to the paralysis that the
 
 220 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 persistent advocacy of a discredited and 
 impracticable panacea induces in thought. 
 How can Labour thought be mobile and free 
 when all the roads must lead to Marx ? How 
 can it gain in popular favour when, at a time 
 like this, the upshot of its every argument, 
 avowed or not, is that you must have more 
 officials and more public expenditure ? When 
 the Socialists captured the Labour Represen- 
 tation Committee, which was the father of 
 the present Labour Party, their contribution 
 was that they had a remedy for one and every 
 evil, namely, that the State should buy, 
 administer, or work something. They supplied 
 the trade unions with a political programme at 
 a time when they did not know quite what they 
 wanted, and it was something different from 
 what the other parties had to offer and it 
 sounded " advanced." Since then the world 
 has turned round. The world has had in the 
 war a vast experiment in State Socialism, and 
 is frightened of it. The idea that then was 
 " advanced " is now seen to be retrograde. 
 
 The party will never do anything with this 
 German-Jewish tin-can of State Socialism tied 
 to its tail. The cause of the comparative 
 unpopularity of sermons is that, though they 
 command a general measure of approval, their 
 conclusions are always known beforehand.
 
 MR. BRACE AND OTHERS 221 
 
 How much more unfortunate than parsons are 
 those politicians whose conclusions are not only 
 known beforehand but generally reprobated. 
 To be just to the Labour Party, they have 
 lately shown a tendency to get away from the 
 barren formulae of State Socialism. The kind 
 of nationalisation that was advocated for the 
 mines, for example, was not State Socialism 
 at all, but more like syndicalism, contemplating 
 as it did a form of joint ownership, in which 
 the State was only one of three partners. This 
 is a wholesome tendency of the new Labour 
 thought, and when it has been worked out it 
 will make a great difference both to Labour 
 power in Parliament and to the help that they 
 can give in the solution of our troubles. 
 
 State Socialism is no more a distinctively 
 Labour doctrine than is Toryism. It follows 
 that Socialism, as such, should be cut off from 
 the Labour Party and become an independent 
 party It will be much better for Socialism, 
 as Herr Ledebour used to argue against Mr. 
 Ramsay MacDonald, for it will then have a 
 chance as a highly intellectual political creed. 
 On the other hand, it will be better for the 
 Labour Party, too, which then will be free to 
 get to grips with practical politics. 
 
 There are many directions in which Labour 
 thought would be free to develop and justify
 
 222 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 its existence as a strong and independent party, 
 capable on occasion of taking office. There are 
 the early ideas of co-partnership and profit- 
 sharing ; there are Guild Socialism and Syndi- 
 calism ; there is the tremendous problem, as 
 interesting and vital to the welfare of Labour 
 as of Capital, of increased efficiency. Sort 
 out the speeches made from the Labour benches 
 this last Session, empty them of generalities, 
 and imagine them made each from one or other 
 of these points of view, and what a wonderful 
 difference in relevancy and practicality there 
 would be !
 
 LORD CARSON
 
 LORD CARSON.
 
 XVII 
 LORD CARSON 
 
 OF all the great men in English history, 
 Gladstone was surely the worst judge 
 of political human nature. Before he 
 introduced his first Home Rule Bill he is said 
 to have felt quite sure about Chamberlain 
 and very doubtful about Harcourt. Some 
 overtures for support he did make to English 
 Conservatives, but Irish Conservatives he 
 ignored and, what was still more remarkable, 
 he forgot Ulster, then a Liberal stronghold. 
 
 To an ordinary man, it would have been 
 an obvious counsel of prudence to sound Ulster 
 and, if possible, persuade her beforehand. Had 
 he done so and met with any measure of 
 success, the first Home Rule Bill would have 
 been a better Bill than his own, and had even 
 more Home Rule in it, for the only way of 
 reconciling Ulster to the idea of Home Rule for 
 Ireland was then, as now, by the offer of Home 
 Rule to herself. In fact, it would have been 
 a Bill on the same general lines as the Act now 
 in force. Had such a Bill been introduced a 
 15 225
 
 226 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 generation ago, the North and South would by 
 this time have composed their differences ; 
 Irish politics would have been running on the 
 same wholesome differences between Liberal, 
 Labour, and Conservative that divide opinion 
 in other countries, instead of following the 
 wholly unnatural divisions of geography and 
 religious faith ; there would have been no 
 rebellions ; and Lord Carson (the familiar " Sir 
 Edward " is still hard to merge in the new 
 title), if he had not developed into a Grattan, 
 would have been, at any rate, Lord Chancellor 
 of a united Ireland. 
 
 Alas, the Conservatives were the first to 
 understand Ulster, and Mr. Balfour was the 
 first to recognise the gifts of Lord Carson. 
 
 The mean and unworthy estimate of 
 Lord Carson's character, though it can be 
 made to fit in with a great many facts, is the 
 wrong one, and it is not, in reality, that of 
 Ireland generally. He is not an Ulsterman, 
 though he speaks for Ulster ; though narrow 
 he can be generous ; he is free from the 
 religious bigotry which is the curse of Northern 
 Ireland ; he has the brogue, not of Belfast, but 
 of Galway, the most beautiful of all the monu- 
 ments of melancholy in Ireland ; and he loves 
 his country not part of it merely, but the 
 whole. It is one of the tragedies of Irish history
 
 LORD CARSON 227 
 
 that his gifts should have been at the service 
 of half a province instead of the cause of 
 united Ireland, and there are times when one 
 suspects that he feels it as tragedy of his own 
 life too. For no one has heard him replying 
 to Mr. Asquith on a question of Irish policy 
 without suspecting that, apart from the specific 
 disagreement of the moment, there is deep down 
 in his nature a feeling of personal resentment 
 against official Liberalism for warping his 
 nature and twisting the sort of work that he 
 might have done for Ireland. 
 
 Between him and the remnant of Irish 
 Nationalists in the House there was no such 
 gulf. They belaboured each other, but with it 
 all there was some understanding and a great 
 deal of respect, and of Sir Edward Carson, when 
 he was organising rebellion in Ulster, there was 
 far more popular admiration even in the rest 
 of Ireland than there was in all England, outside 
 Liverpool and the Carlton Club. But in every 
 gesture towards the official Liberal benches 
 there is the same accusation of faithlessness 
 " We were yours and you cast us off " a 
 charge that cannot be brought against Nation- 
 alism or Sinn Fein. 
 
 One ought not to ignore this grievance of 
 Lord Carson as a good Irishman against 
 the blundering tactics of Gladstone which
 
 228 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 presented him with it, for, rightly handled, the 
 question of Home Rule in 1886 was far easier 
 than now, and might have been solved. But 
 if he has a grievance, so have others England 
 and Ireland both against him. He did not 
 teach Ireland to rebel, but he led the only 
 successful rebellion she has made, and the 
 lesson was not lost. Ireland as a whole, too, 
 has a grievance against him as a lost leader of 
 union. 
 
 The most dramatic apparition to be seen in 
 the House of Commons has until the other day 
 been that of Lord Carson at the door when 
 an Irish debate was proceeding. Especially 
 now, with the Irish Nationalist Party a 
 mere twittering ghost of its former great- 
 ness, there is always an element of theatri- 
 cality in Irish debates ; someone said once 
 that there ought to be a row of footlights 
 all round the Irish coast. It may be the 
 theatricality of Irish debate, or there may be 
 some positive suggestion in the tall, lank 
 figure, the straight black hair, the hollow 
 cheeks, and the lengthened chin, but one could 
 not help thinking of Mephisto in the play at 
 such times. 
 
 And the impression is not removed by the 
 rich brogue and is deepened by the corrosion 
 and negation of what he says. Nothing in
 
 LORD CARSON 229 
 
 politics seems worth while when he speaks ; 
 Irish ideals are balloons blown up with gas ; 
 a new thought or hope is treated like a hostile 
 witness ; the great world pines to the dimen- 
 sions of a poky court of justice, and nothing 
 seems to matter but what is concrete enough 
 to be put into an affidavit. It is all mag- 
 nificently done, for Lord Carson has not 
 risen on nothing to the position of perhaps 
 the most famous of living advocates. He has 
 in a supreme degree the faculty of dissolving 
 a state of mind into little crystals of fact and 
 holding each up to the light that is appropriate 
 to his purpose. No one in our time at the 
 Bar has had his power of unexpected thrust 
 and stab in cross-examination, and he has so 
 cultivated the habit of always speaking at the 
 greatest common measure of intelligence in a 
 jury that he has lost the power of rising above 
 it. Outside Irish affairs for example, on 
 labour topics he speaks occasionally with 
 flashes of originality and sentimental insight, 
 but ordinarily on politics he is a barrister whose 
 rare distinction of manner cannot disguise the 
 mediocrity and dullness of what he has to say. 
 If Lord Carson had never turned rebel, 
 popular opinion would have neglected him as a 
 politician ; but his organisation of the con- 
 tingent rebellion in the North of Ireland made
 
 230 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 him a scoundrel in the eyes of many and a hero 
 with others, and with nearly all profoundly 
 modified the estimates of his character. A few, 
 indeed, there were who still refused to take his 
 politics seriously ; to them he was still a stage 
 Irishman only, bedadding and bejabering, even 
 when he was talking hypothetical treason and 
 civil war. 
 
 In fact, his action at this time proved the 
 exact contrary. It may not have been a great 
 thing for him at his time of life to throw up an 
 exceedingly lucrative practice and devote him- 
 self entirely to the work of organising resistance 
 to the enforcing of the Home Rule Act. But 
 it was a great thing for him to run the risk 
 of arrest and the social disgrace, not to speak 
 of the physical danger, of being a rebel. It 
 was proof that he really cared, that his denun- 
 ciation of Home Rule was the outcome of real 
 conviction, and even that he had the stuff of 
 martyrdom in him. There is no exaggerating 
 the mischief that was done to the country by 
 the formation of the Ulster army ; but when 
 all is said, it is a test of sincerity that a man 
 should in the last resort be prepared to fight 
 in a cause of conscience when he is convinced 
 that no other honourable issue is possible. 
 And by that test the Government of the day 
 which did not arrest Sir Edward Carson
 
 LORD CARSON 231 
 
 stands condemned in its Irish policy. What- 
 ever Irish policy was to be adopted later, it 
 must inevitably after that be a policy that 
 did not involve the coercion of Ulster, and to 
 have established that principle, if a negative 
 achievement, redeems his political career from 
 barrenness and contempt. 
 
 Lord Carson might have done still more 
 and achieved political greatness had he, after 
 this victory, known how to use it for the 
 service of all Ireland. For now because 
 rather than in spite of the war was the time 
 to achieve the unity of Ireland, and Lord 
 Carson, by close co-operation with the 
 Unionists of the rest of Ireland, if not with 
 the Nationalists too, might have achieved that 
 end. The opportunity was neglected and 
 Lord Carson remained the leader of a pro- 
 vince when he might have been so much 
 more. The truth was and his brief tenure of 
 office during the war confirms it that he is 
 quite without constructive ability of any kind. 
 Absolutely dependent on others for his general 
 ideas, he might have served a greater cause 
 than that of Ulster had he fallen early under 
 the right influences. But the official Liberal 
 Party first neglected him and then abused 
 him, as it did Chamberlain and later (so 
 far as the abuse went at any rate) Mr.
 
 232 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Lloyd George, and he never realised all of 
 which he might have been capable. There 
 were also faults of temperament as well as of 
 mind. For all that is said of his personal 
 kindliness and good-nature, there are hundreds 
 of instances that might be quoted in support, 
 and the caricaturists who see the man with the 
 Red Indian profile and the combative jaws 
 see less than strangers who, meeting him for 
 the first time, are fascinated by the dark 
 melancholy of the eyes. He is a man of a deep 
 emotional nature, and the show of truculence 
 is only the protective hardening of a skin that 
 is more tender than most people's. But there 
 are some humans perhaps more numerous in 
 Ireland than elsewhere whose devotion to 
 those who depend on them takes the form of 
 intense distrust and ferocity towards every- 
 one else. They rend and tear, not out of 
 cruelty but out of a too restricted and, as 
 it were, provincial range of affection. Lord 
 Carson was of these, and the fact ruined him 
 as a national politician.
 
 CAPTAIN ELLIOT
 
 [Vandyk 
 
 CAPTAIN ELLIOT.
 
 XVIII 
 CAPTAIN ELLIOT 
 
 IF it be objected that Captain Elliot re- 
 sembles a stalagmite rather than a 
 pillar that supports the roof of the 
 State, the answer is he is only young yet, and 
 that youth as such has rights of its own. 
 Captain Elliot has turned thirty by a year or 
 two. There are others who are even younger, 
 but extreme youth tends to be old-fashioned. 
 Captain Elliot, while old enough not to be 
 that, is still young enough to realise that the 
 ends of the next generation are in the keeping 
 of him and his likes. Let the future, therefore, 
 redress the heavy balance that the past has 
 had in these pages. 
 
 Captain Elliot comes of prosperous yeoman 
 stock in Lanark, read medicine at Glasgow 
 University with some contemporaries of 
 genius as yet unknown to fame, served with 
 the Scots Greys at Cambrai and other hot 
 places, and at the end of the war was elected 
 as a Coalition Unionist. It was a strange 
 choice for a man of his temperament, but when 
 
 235
 
 236 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 reproached with his political nomenclature, he 
 points out that Unionism is not Conservatism, 
 but includes Liberal and Radical elements. 
 He came to London thinking that he might 
 combine laboratory work with work as a 
 Member, but Parliament turned out in his case 
 to be a jealous mistress, and instead of walking 
 in hospital he is oftener flying in politics with 
 a preference for the kite observation service. 
 But he retains his deep interest in public 
 health, and he has a room at the Scottish Office 
 by virtue of some minor unpaid post. In 
 appearance he is large and unbeautiful, in the 
 way of the Newfoundland dog, and though, 
 like this noble animal, he will sometimes upset 
 social kickshaws and tea-trays in a drawing- 
 room (metaphorically speaking, of course), he 
 is in much request amongst fashionable and 
 other people for his gaiety and high spirits, 
 and the originality of his views. Yet he has 
 known sorrow. Two years ago he and his 
 wife were on their honeymoon in Skye, were 
 benighted in a thick mist on a mountain-side, 
 and fell down a scree. She was killed, and he 
 escaped with injuries and a serious illness. As 
 always with the perfervid Scot, there are deep 
 and unsuspected holes in his nature, like the 
 lakes in his own mountains. 
 
 His speaking in the House, though fluent
 
 CAPTAIN ELLIOT 237 
 
 and not unmelodious, is too much like his 
 talking to be in a good Parliamentary manner. 
 He has none of the airs and graces of debate, he 
 attacks instead of wooing his subject, and his 
 speech has the jerky, breathless movement of 
 thought. Many people think he is joking when 
 he is merely exaggerating an aspect of truth, 
 and several times he has been in danger of 
 acquiring the reputation of a humorist, which 
 is always fatal to solid success in Parliament. 
 His friends say that his political gifts show 
 better in conversation than in public speech. 
 Certainly on his day, and especially on his 
 night, he will make political talk more 
 interesting than any speech dare be. A 
 proposition begun in a quizzical drawl will, 
 like a mountain stream issuing from a bog, 
 end in a spate. Paradox generates paradox, 
 and yet they are always relevant to the matter 
 in hand, never tangential nor idly discursive. 
 He has a Highland fondness for splashing about 
 in generalities, but also the Lowlander's 
 instinct for what is practical. It is at such 
 times that one understands why his position 
 in politics is higher than his actual performance 
 in the House, though this is not inconsiderable, 
 would suggest. 
 
 Like most men who have seen much active 
 service in the war, Captain Elliot loathes the
 
 238 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 idea of human purification through pain and 
 suffering. He has brought back from the 
 front both the soldier's habit of jesting at 
 death, and a crusader's zeal against life that 
 is compounded of misery and ill-health. One 
 has often noted that amongst men who have 
 seen dreadful things at the war. The same man 
 will mockingly sing that cruel soldier's ditty : 
 
 Do you want to find your sweetheart ? 
 
 I know where he is : (tris) 
 
 He's hanging on the old barbed wire. 
 
 (Chorus) I saw him, I saw him, 
 
 Hanging on the old barbed wire, I saw him, 
 Hanging on the old barbed wire 
 
 and then tingle with sensibility over a Debussy 
 prelude, and rebuke the stay-at-home's political 
 apathy to the preventible pain around him. 
 War has with many hardened the skin 
 to a carapace, and at the same time softened 
 the heart beneath. The army, at any rate, is 
 not for stinting any help that politics can give 
 to the underdog, and in this respect Captain 
 Elliot represents the feelings of the younger 
 generation. 
 
 The young ex-officer from the war, of whom 
 Captain Elliot is a type, has not yet fulfilled 
 in our politics all that was expected of him. 
 The fertility and novelty of idea which were so 
 fascinating when he was under discipline are
 
 CAPTAIN ELLIOT 239 
 
 apt to sport rather violently when that dis- 
 cipline is removed, and from the trenches to 
 the lobbies is a dangerous transplanting. But 
 ex-officers like Coote, Austin Hopkinson, and 
 Elliot, have brought into the House some- 
 thing that the old regular army never could 
 give it, and their combination of boyish 
 enthusiasm with the realism that comes of 
 looking death so often in the face may have 
 something of permanent value for our politics. 
 Some examples may be given of his politics, 
 because they not only help to explain him, but 
 show how completely the war has confused 
 old party lines, and how impossible it is for a 
 realist to return to the old party allegiance. 
 Captain Elliot visited Austria in 1919, and 
 came back with a rooted dislike of the tyranny 
 which the ideas of nationalism have exercised 
 over men's minds in the last ten years. 
 
 Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum 
 
 might have been said, though it was not, by 
 someone fresh back from the Crusades, and in 
 that spirit Captain Elliot regarded the follies 
 of unchastened nationalism in the partition of 
 the old Austro -Hungarian Empire. Perhaps it 
 is natural for Unionism to deplore the excesses 
 of the national spirit, but in his insistence that 
 economics are as important a factor in shaping
 
 240 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 the life of a state as blood or language, he nearly 
 comes full cycle round to the Manchester 
 school and vindicates the reality of the 
 economic man, at any rate in international 
 affairs. In the same vein was an argument he 
 one day developed in the House, with the 
 experience of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 
 before him, against Home Rule for Scotland 
 on the ground that it might impose delays in 
 transit between the two countries. 
 
 On Ireland and on labour politics, also, 
 Captain Elliot showed that he belonged to a 
 younger school which has outgrown the old 
 divisions of thought. His view on Ireland (and 
 that of Captain Coote, who works and lives 
 with him in a little house in Westminster) 
 was that, having made up our mind to give 
 Ireland Home Rule, we ought to give the 
 amplest and most generous measure. He was 
 prepared to allow Ireland to have its own 
 army and navy even, and he ridiculed the 
 fear that it would involve any risk to England. 
 " Are you afraid of an Irish Republic ? Why, 
 I should threaten them with an Irish Republic 
 if they didn't behave." He is never tired of 
 developing the theme that the Englishman is 
 ridiculously nervous and self-depreciatory, and 
 too inclined to apologise for his existence in 
 the world. He took an active part in the con-
 
 CAPTAIN ELLIOT 241 
 
 troversy on the coal stoppage. Strongly 
 opposed to the miners' project of a national 
 pool, it was he who was responsible for Mr. 
 Frank Hodges' visit to the House of Commons, 
 which broke up the Triple Alliance. 
 
 It is too early yet to prophesy the future 
 political development of Captain Elliot, but 
 that with reasonable luck (and luck plays a 
 great part in politics as in war) he will take a 
 prominent place some day seems in the highest 
 degree likely. It may be that he will attach 
 himself to a new and improved Liberal Party. 
 He may join a new school of Unionist 
 Coalition, such as Lord Birkenhead and Mr. 
 Churchill might conceivably head. Certain 
 it is both that he has no sympathy with Lord 
 Derby's Conservatism, and that his early enthu- 
 siasm for the present Coalition is weaker. But 
 settlement comes late in political life some- 
 times it does not come at all and the straightest 
 minds will execute the strangest curves be- 
 tween youth and maturity. So may his. 
 
 16
 
 PARLIAMENTARY 
 GOVERNMENT
 
 POSTSCRIPT 
 
 THE FUTURE OF PARLIAMENTARY 
 GOVERNMENT 
 
 DEMOCRATIC government in England is 
 passing through a crisis of which the 
 country is only vaguely conscious. It 
 feels that constitutional changes are in progress, 
 but it ascribes the causes of discontent to decay 
 in the quality of Members of Parliament or to 
 increasing selfishness and lack of principle 
 amongst its leaders. Neither explanation is 
 true, either in fact or as a diagnosis. The 
 trouble goes much deeper than any defects in 
 personnel. Indeed, despite the popular belief, 
 the personnel alike of the Government and of 
 Parliament at this time is far above the average. 
 We have a Prime Minister who has certainly 
 more genius for politics than anyone in English 
 history since Chatham, and he has a Ministry 
 of All the Talents. Nor is Parliament below the 
 level of its predecessors, except in its lack of an 
 Opposition. That apart, it has more than the 
 average ability, and in elasticity of mind and 
 accessibility to argument, two of the greatest 
 virtues a Commons can have, it is easily first 
 in modern times. As for honesty, ninety-nine 
 
 245
 
 246 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 men out of a hundred are honest, and neither 
 Ministries nor Members of Parliament fall 
 below this percentage. Of all the vices of 
 political discussion, none is so contemptible as 
 this habit of explaining political difficulties by 
 debiting with some moral kink those who differ 
 from us. There is no rational debate on politics 
 possible which does not start from the assumption 
 that we are all decent people, honestly desirous 
 of doing the best for our country. Those who will 
 not subscribe to that had better give up politics 
 and turn mad fakirs or howling dervishes. 
 
 The trouble is not in the bad character of 
 politicians, but in the fact that there are new 
 forces at work of which our intellectual appre- 
 ciation is still very imperfect, and if that be so, 
 one has cause for thankfulness that our age is 
 stirring. It is further evidence in addition to 
 that furnished by the war that we are far better 
 than our fathers, who lived on the interpreta- 
 tion of old ideas in politics and not on the 
 fashioning of new ones. Another shallow 
 diagnosis is that our troubles proceed from the 
 neglect of the old principle of Cabinet respon- 
 sibility under which the Cabinet thought and 
 acted as one man, and the smallest act of any 
 one department was treated as the solemn 
 decision of the whole Cabinet. The principle 
 is dead beyond hope or desert of resurrection.
 
 PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT 247 
 
 What is the sense of expecting not only the 
 Prime Minister, but every other member of the 
 Cabinet, to know everything that is happening 
 in every other department ? Peel, as long ago 
 as 1845, defied the Prime Minister to perform 
 properly the theoretical duties of his office, and 
 the duties of Government in those days were 
 compared with those of to-day, as a bow- 
 windowed shop to a vast emporium. Besides, 
 the principle is fatal to Parliamentary efficiency. 
 Parliament has some chance of defeating the 
 policy of a single Minister ; but if he is to be 
 sheltered behind the doctrine of Cabinet 
 responsibility, its only effective form of protest 
 against any action is to commit hari-kari. 
 
 The burden of nearly all comment on the 
 British Parliament in the last twenty years is 
 the growing power of the Executive, due to the 
 stricter organisation of the party system, the 
 development of the caucus, and so on. Un- 
 doubtedly, Coalition has increased this distur- 
 bance of the balance. Under the old party 
 system, you had at any rate one party for 
 which the Government could not conceivably 
 do right ; but now under a Coalition the criticism 
 of the Opposition is that of a minority of a 
 party. A huge Government maj ority is the worst 
 enemy of efficient Parliamentary work. This 
 evil, which is indubitable and is as bad for the
 
 248 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Government as for Parliament, is likely to be 
 cured before long, for the Coalition can hardly 
 remain on its present basis. Coalition in 
 some form is the condition of politics for the 
 next ten years at least, for there is as little life 
 in pure official Conservatism as in official 
 Liberalism. Conservatism, by splitting off 
 from Mr. Lloyd George, would form a party 
 little larger than that of the official Liberals, 
 and for the sake of the Coalition is it to be 
 hoped that, if it proposes to obstruct and dis- 
 tort its policy, it will split off and lose no time 
 about it. The future of politics is with a Centre 
 composed of progressive Liberals and Conser- 
 vatives, and if possible, also of a bourgeois 
 Labour group, for the Labour Party is a very 
 artificial unity, and logically for Parliamentary 
 purposes ought to split too. This Centre party 
 (whatever its precise name may be) might 
 have Liberal and Conservative fringes. 
 Opposite it would be the bulk of the Labour 
 Party. In this sense, Mr. Lloyd George is 
 right in envisaging the future of politics as a 
 contest between the bourgeois and the Labour 
 parties. Those Labour men who are to be 
 detached are much nearer to the Coalition than 
 to the Independent Liberals, and the notion of 
 an alliance between Labour and the Wee Frees 
 is both impracticable and, if it were practicable,
 
 PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT 249 
 
 would be suicidal for the Liberals. The thing 
 to pray for is a Coalition without its recalcitrant 
 Conservatives and with the progressive Wee 
 Frees, with a smaller majority, and if possible 
 with an alliance with the Labour right wing. 
 
 But this grouping and regrouping of political 
 parties is only the froth on the surface. The 
 main current of politics is, as has already been 
 said in these pages, towards a sort of Liberalism, 
 not that of the priests of Abingdon Street, but 
 such as Mr. Lloyd George, if freed from his 
 entanglements, might profess and ensue. But 
 underneath the main current there are under- 
 currents, and our concern is rather with these. 
 For it is of the future of Parliamentary rather 
 than of national politics that we are now 
 thinking. 
 
 The strongest of these undercurrents is the 
 contention between Parliamentary authority 
 and the representative system in politics on 
 the one hand, and what may be called the 
 principle of direct action in government. The 
 direct action party in Labour politics, which 
 seeks to accomplish its ends by economic 
 pressure without reference to the slower 
 methods of Parliamentary persuasion, everyone 
 knows. But there has grown up in Government 
 quarters a direct action party which likes to 
 appeal to the sovereign people direct, through
 
 250 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 the Press now that the platform is losing its 
 power, and over the heads of its constitutional 
 representatives in the Commons. The extreme 
 jealousy which Parliament shows towards the 
 newspapers is not without cause, for there has 
 been a sensible change in the balance of the 
 constitution ; it is like the old jealousy which 
 the senate had towards the comitia and the 
 forum in the later days of the Roman Republic. 
 Between the vast ochlocracy of the electorate 
 which is easiest reached through the mega- 
 phone of the newspapers and the Triumvirate 
 of the Inner Cabinet, the representative system 
 is in danger of being crushed out. It is some- 
 times said that when the Irish question has 
 been settled, the last of the old political issues 
 will have disappeared, and the basis of political 
 controversy will be shifted definitely on to an 
 economic basis. But is not this new issue 
 between the representative system of govern- 
 ment and direct rule a political issue of the 
 first constitutional importance ? 
 
 The victory of the representative system is 
 by no means a matter of course as is generally 
 imagined, for the growth in the power of the 
 Executive is one of the commonplaces of 
 politics, and the methods of politics must 
 constantly be changing their mechanism. The 
 printed word has long been superior to the
 
 PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT 251 
 
 spoken, and with universal education its 
 mastery has become stronger. Not only is its 
 appeal far wider, but whereas the effect of a 
 speech is transient and the atmosphere of a 
 public meeting is of all most unfavourable to 
 calm deliberation, the printed word can be 
 taken home, read a dozen times, and examined 
 in every possible light. The public meeting is 
 already tending to become obsolescent ; the 
 real influence over an electorate is in the 
 printed reports of a meeting, which are usually 
 very inadequate, and in the comments of writers. 
 It may be that the representative system, 
 however useful with a limited and illiterate 
 electorate, may be obsolete in a community in 
 which everyone can read. The largest public 
 meeting at an election does not exceed 5,000, 
 which is an exceedingly small circulation for a 
 newspaper, and, moreover, the newspaper 
 appears every day, whereas, even at times of 
 the greatest politcal excitement, meetings that 
 appeal to a tithe of the circulation of the good 
 daily can only be addressed once a fortnight on 
 the average. It may be that the representative 
 system was only a temporary expedient adapted 
 to small electorates and an illiterate age, and 
 that the printing press will transfer our politics 
 back to the stage at which the fortunes of 
 nations were determined by a forum speech.
 
 252 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 The printing press, in fact, does enable a pro- 
 minent politician to gather forty million people 
 in a forum and address them as though they 
 were a crowd of a few hundreds. True, the 
 words are spoken first, but that is only an acci- 
 dent, and it is easy to leave out the speech and 
 deliver it direct to the Press. The future 
 politician may well say to his rival, " You may 
 hold all the meetings if I can control a few 
 newspapers." This is the real menace to the 
 representative system, and to the authority of 
 Parliament. 
 
 While the printed word is daily extending 
 its influence, oratory has been as steadily 
 declining in power, and the methods of Parlia- 
 ment, with a few alterations, are what they were 
 fifty years ago. In this unequal competition 
 Parliament must sooner or later succumb, 
 unless it reforms its methods, and with it we 
 shall lose the representative system and revert 
 to the old methods of appeal to the casual crowd 
 in the forum, only the appeal will be in print, and 
 the forum at the fireside of every elector who 
 can read. Already Parliament is dependent 
 on the publicity it receives in the newspapers. 
 
 It would be a disaster if direct Cabinet, or 
 worse still merely personal, rule through the 
 newspapers were substituted for the control of 
 Parliament, for no one can see much of Parlia-
 
 PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT 253 
 
 mentary work without recognising that, how- 
 ever great its imperfections, it is after all 
 superior as an instrument of democratic govern- 
 ment to the casual readings and ponderings on 
 what they read of millions of separate electors. 
 But the tendency of the age is very definite, and 
 it is all against the continued authority of Parlia- 
 ment, especially if this authority is under any 
 suspicion of subservience to party or persons. 
 
 What are the remedies suggested for a danger 
 that is grave and more imminent than is 
 generally suspected ? The first is an improve- 
 ment of the House of Commons' methods of 
 doing its work. Question time is the freshest 
 and liveliest time of the day, and it ought to be 
 extended so as to give an opportunity daily for 
 an interpellation or a short debate on the 
 question of the hour. Nothing so shakes the 
 authority of Parliament as its enforced silence 
 on the subjects that are most in men's minds. 
 Yet another and very important change would 
 be an extension of the Committee system, 
 which would give Commons Committees the 
 right to call for all relevant documents, to 
 inspect and to prepare a considered report on 
 every subject of importance, and to give 
 independent guidance to the debate. 
 
 But there is another and more important 
 reform if Parliament is to maintain its con-
 
 254 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 stitutional position, and the spoken word is 
 not to be defeated by the printed word. 
 Parliament must act ; an opinion may be 
 ignored by a popular Press, but acts cannot 
 be. The strategic key of the situation is the 
 right to dissolve Parliament at present possessed 
 by the Government, and the strongest of all 
 the arguments that a Government can use 
 against revolt is the threat that if it is defeated 
 it will go to the country. This power must not 
 remain in the hands of the Government if 
 Parliament is to maintain its position. 
 
 "Resignation, nothing more, might be 
 borne. But, in fact, resignation means that 
 Parliament, too, comes to an end in other 
 words, that every Member is fined 1,000 in 
 election expenses, and this power of fine tells 
 heavily against the free and independent 
 Parliament that the country wants. True, 
 the country sent them to Westminster to 
 support a Government and a policy, but surely 
 with their heads on, not without them. If 
 with their heads on, they must be free to vote 
 against the Government ; if they are not to be 
 free, Parliament might just as well be a cash- 
 register with 700- odd parti- coloured keys, a com- 
 plicated mechanical toy for Whips to play with. 
 
 "It is not only the financial fine that 
 matters. An honest vote on Ireland, by bring-
 
 PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT 255 
 
 ing about a General Election, may prejudice 
 half a dozen other reforms in which the House 
 is interested. The independent Member has to 
 ask himself, ' Shall I, by making, for example, Sir 
 Eric Geddes as Minister of Transport impossible, 
 or by throwing out the E.P.D., imperil a settle- 
 ment in Ireland or a real peace in Europe ? ' 
 That sort of reflection, so fatal to real indepen- 
 dence, should not perplex him, and would not 
 but for the Government's power to have a 
 General Election as and when it chooses. If 
 the Government is defeated in the Commons, 
 it is prima facie a sign, not that Parliament 
 should be re-elected, but that the Government 
 should be reconstructed. 
 
 " What, then, is needed ? Simply this : 
 that a Parliament, elected for four or five years 
 it might be four or three should sit for its 
 natural term unless it agrees by a vote that it 
 cannot carry on. If it defeats the Government, 
 but does not want a General Election before 
 its time is up, then, if the Government cannot 
 honestly give way, a new Government should 
 be formed that will. All Governments will 
 resist a change that so seriously undermines 
 their power over Parliament. All Parliaments 
 should, therefore, work for a reform that will 
 so usefully alter the balance of political power. 
 
 " Having gone so far, we must go farther.
 
 256 PILLARS OF THE STATE 
 
 Another dull patch in the lungs of democracy 
 is the fact that as things are Parliament has no 
 real control over taxation. It cannot propose 
 or impose a new tax, which is as well. But 
 neither can it take off a tax without bringing 
 down the Government. The country, or the 
 greater part of it, rocked with indignation 
 when the Lords threw out the People's Budget. 
 Finance was the concern of the popularly 
 elected chamber alone. But when did the 
 Commons throw out a Budget ? When is it 
 going to begin to exercise real control over 
 taxation ? And if neither the Commons nor 
 the Lords control, what is our system of 
 taxation but one of Executive requisitions, 
 tempered by the right of the Commons to throw 
 everything in the melting-pot, including the 
 careers of its Members, by defeating the Govern- 
 ment and bringing about a General Election ? " l 
 No, it is not true, as is sometimes said, that 
 the main interest of politics in the future will be 
 economic rather than political. For there is, or 
 should be, a great constitutional struggle ahead 
 between the Executive and the Commons a 
 struggle in which this time the House of Lords 
 may take part on the same side as the Commons. 
 
 1 Scrutator in the Sunday Times.
 
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