The British Cabinet and Its Implications

I

FROM more than one point of view the recent reconstruction of the British Ministry makes history.

The modest strength of Mr. Bonar Law — his shrewdness, veracity, and genuine talent for debate and Parliamentary management — would hardly in itself have sufficed to give him any considerable place in history. Six months’ occupation of 10 Downing Street make no man’s title clear to immortality; and for the rest, Mr. Bonar Law’s whole career was that of an inspired understudy. In a negative way he had large importance, and much might have been otherwise but for his faculty for self-effacement. But such neutral characters are soon forgotten, and but for the manner and consequences of his resignation, there would be little to recall Mr. Law a century hence. He would be one with the Robinsons and the Addingtons. But the last irony of a career always ironical has probably secured him a place of permanent interest in the history of British constitutional development. Bonar Law’s throat may be even more famous than Jenkins’s ear. The latter produced only a war. To the former the historian may perhaps trace the beginnings of a revolution.

For it can hardly be doubted that the tragic collapse of Mr. Law’s health has settled the fate of a still more august invalid. The British House of Lords has been poorly ever since the operation Mr. Asquith performed on it in 1911. But it could never be said that some combination of favoring circumstances might not restore it to something like its pristine vigor. That possibility seems to have definitely vanished. The House is not dead, but it is almost certainly doomed. In the English way it may take an unconscionable time in dying. It is not easy to conceive the miracle that can now prevent its death.

Mr. Bonar Law fell at a very awkward time, before the breach in the Conservative Party could be healed, and also before new ability could be developed. In destroying the Coalition, and with it the hopes of permanently establishing a disguised absolutism founded on the sterilization of the two historic parties, Mr. Law had necessarily to build his Administration of rather second-rate material. The most distinguished of the Conservative statesmen, profoundly out of touch with the general body of their supporters, adhered to Mr. Lloyd George. They could hardly in honor have done otherwise. They had given him all kinds of pledges. They had worked with him for years on terms of the utmost cordiality. They were deeply committed to his policies. They could not escape the consequences of what seemed to them a loyal cooperation and what seemed to many of their followers a surrender of party principles and interests.

But the fact was none the less unfortunate for the new Prime Minister. He was obliged to dispense with the mature wisdom and great prestige of Lord Balfour, with the rather garish but undeniable qualities of Lord Birkenhead, with the shrewdness and business ability of Sir Robert Horne, with the not contemptible practical faculty of Sir Laming WorthingtonEvans.

There are some to whom the loss of Mr. Chamberlain might seem less grave. But it denied to the new Cabinet a man important in his representative capacity, in view of his position as the hereditary chief of the Liberal Unionists, and important also for his ripe experience, his fair renown as a specially honest statesman, his great knowledge of the House of Commons, and his mastery of the details of administration.

Such defection, though it could never be anything but embarrassing, would have been less serious in normal times. For ordinarily there is a constant undergrowth of political ability, and the succession to a particular office is generally indicated long before it falls vacant. But one of the gravest effects of the coalition system, prolonged after its usefulness had been exhausted, was that it dried up the springs. The close relations between the two great parties implied an oversupply of tested men. During the war all the great posts, and many even of the minor offices, were filled either by elder statesmen or by the business men whom the superstition of the time — for it was mainly a superstition — demanded. Thus few recruits were taken from the back benches; the House of Commons itself attracted relatively little young ambition; and when the Coalition fell, there was a scarcely paralleled dearth of experienced juniors.

Mr. Bonar Law showed a shrewd judgment in making the best of a bad job. Lord Curzon’s adhesion freed him from his worst difficulty, that of foreign affairs; he was able to fill the other great posts with men of respedable if not brilliant abilities; and he was especially happy in discerning the high potentialities of Mr. Stanley Baldwin. Nevertheless the Ministry, on the whole, justified the criticisms of being largely composed of ‘secondclass brains.’ If, had present respectability and some promise, but no distinction. Legend, so important in British affairs, was wanting. Three only of the new ministers, Mr. Bonar Law himself, Lord Curzon, and Lord Derby, were known outside the British Islands, or even, in any real sense, within them. Could Mr. Bonar Law have lasted another two years, the legend would, no doubt, have been created; or, if that were impossible, some of the old ministers might have been lured back. To either result six months was a period altogether inadequate.

Thus, when the stricken statesman was forced to admit the superiority of a malign fate, the choice of his successor lay between two men, and two only. There was no shirking the issue. On the one side was a personal distinction and an administrative experience which must, but for a single circumstance, have been decisive. On the other side was a personality pleasant and not lacking in force, but in no way remarkable, and an experience singularly limited. The one candidate could be rejected only on the ground that he was a peer. The other candidate must be accepted chiefly on the ground that he was a commoner. If the case as between the two Chambers had been deliberately arranged, there could hardly have been a sharper definition of the issue.

II

There is no need here to expatiate on Lord Curzon’s qualifications for the premiership. They were great and obvious. But one relevant point should be given its due prominence. In a political career ranging over nearly forty years Lord Curzon had filled with high distinction some of the greatest posts open to a British subject. To each of them he had been appointed strictly on his merits. His position as a grandee, far from helping him, as it might have done in other times, from splendor to splendor, had been in the main an impediment to his advance. Lord Curzon may be said to be, in any philosophical sense of the word, as much a self-made man as Henry Ford. Granted that his first step on the ladder of promotion was a concession to his birth and high connection, the rest can be attributed to nothing but his personal qualities. His youth was one laborious apprenticeship, his prime one prolonged effort. This peer, haughty and aloof in his attitude toward men, has shown himself, in his conception of public duty, no less earnest and humble than he might have been if reared in a workhouse. His abilities, great as they are, are less extraordinary than his industry. His high conscientiousness, it has well been remarked, is equally intolerant of a mistake and a scandal. Wherever he has served the Crown, ill health, climatic extremes, private grief have never relaxed his energy or dulled his sense of public duty. In the departments he has ruled there may have been occasional failures of tact and sympathy; there has never been sloppiness or inefficiency. Lord Curzon belongs to the grand tradition of English statesmanship— the tradition of spotless integrity, high, and perhaps rather inhuman ideals, acceptance of labor and responsibility as the proud burden of wealth and position. His meticulous attention to the details of administration, his precise and luminous eloquence, both belong to the time when great nobles managed the affairs of the State as carefully as they looked after their own possessions.

In a word, Lord Curzon had almost every qualification but one — he was not a member of the House of Commons. His aloofness may be dismissed; he was certainly not more aloof than Lord Salisbury, or even Mr. Balfour, though he lacked the urbanity of the latter, and was, unlike the former, very conscious of his importance as a grandee. And if haughtiness were a disqualification, how many unimpeachable British democrats would escape whipping? Indeed, the semiofficial statement of the case was, for once, strictly and literally true. It acknowledged that, if Lord Curzon had been a member of the representative House, his claims could not have been resisted. He was passed over because the constitution imprisoned him in a Chamber containing not a single member of the official Opposition. Labor is now His Majesty’s Opposition, and in the House of Lords there is no Labor peer. Therefore — so the argument proceeded — a peer Prime Minister must be an absurd anomaly.

III

There is, of course, no suggestion that in emphasizing the claims of Mr. Stanley Baldwin those who had the ear of the King prompted the monarch to a choice unfortunate for the country or for the Conservative Party. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe the appointment an excellent one. Mr. Baldwin quite satisfies his followers; England generally is happy over him; he has achieved a notable success — of which later — in one of his most important appointments; and, so far as can be seen, his Ministry is much stronger than that of his predecessor

— stronger morally, because Mr. Baldwin, unlike Mr. Bonar Law, was never associated with the most debatable policies of the late Coalition; stronger materially, because the Government is free from the contingent liabilities attached to Mr. Law’s always uncertain health.

For the rest, Mr. Baldwin is one of those plain, pleasant, very English types which so often achieve in British politics a success denied to the highest genius. It was said of Mr. Balfour, not altogether untruly, that he was like a beech tree, ‘very beautiful, but nothing would grow under him.’ High distinction and ability in politics often have this sterilizing effect; while the chieftainship of the mediocre — Campbell-Bannerman was a case in point — is sometimes singularly favorable to the evolution of fresh talent. It is yet too early to pronounce Mr. Baldwin mediocre; he suggests, both in his quiet competence and in his liberal culture, much still undeveloped potentiality. But he is of that genial type which does attract and subdue to its purposes men of still higher talents; which brings out the best in every colleague; which smoothes differences, reconciles rivalries, unobtrusively encourages good teamwork, and as insensibly represses undue personal ambitions. Certainly Mr. Baldwin, despite his exceedingly short official experience, is more hopeful as a party leader than Mr. Bonar Law appeared twelve years or so ago; and Mr. Bonar Law is now universally quoted as the classic instance of the dark horse justified.

But the point is not that the British nation and the Conservative Party can accept with great philosophy the disabilities of Lord Curzon as a peer. Those disabilities, it would seem, would have been equally decisive had the Government benches in the House of Commons presented one monotonous level of obvious and incorrigible inferiority. The doctrine has been definitely accepted that no peer can in future expect to control a British cabinet. He may be talented, industrious, efficient, popular; he may be in every sense the man most fitted for supreme power; but while the present conditions hold, — and nobody pretends to see a future in which Labor will not have a considerable Parliamentary representation, — he must not expect to fulfill the natural ambition of a statesman. Over the portals of the House of Lords are now inscribed the words: ‘All hope (except of a departmental job) abandon, ye who enter here.’

This decision, which will undoubtedly be felt at once by the class affected to have the force of a precedent, cannot but accentuate a tendency which has already greatly modified the character of English public life. One of the most noticeable facts of the last twenty years has been the partial abdication of the British aristocracy. ‘The Dukes,’ as Mr. Lloyd George called them, had been a waning force long before he declared war against them. They have since almost disappeared from the political scene. The debates in the House of Lords are generally limited to the members of what may be called the official peerage — the retired proconsuls and the translated House of Commons politicians — and the newly ennobled plutocrats. In the House of Commons the young aristocrat still lingers, but only a relatively insignificant number of cadets of noble houses can be found to undergo the drudgery of modern electioneering and the routine at once tiresome and exacting, of an overworked legislature. With the new ban on the Upper Chamber, the temptation of a peer’s heir to take up public life must be very considerably diminished; and a further diminution must be expected of the supply of that kind of talent and instinct for affairs which has in the past contributed so greatly to the efficiency and stability of the English polity.

IV

But of course the unconditional preference of the House of Commons over the House of Lords cuts far deeper. It means, logically, that the House of Lords cannot survive. For the declared ground of the preference is that the House of Lords no longer represents the people, or, at any rate, a very important section of the people.

‘ Labor is and may always be the second largest party in the State; Labor has no peers; therefore what is the sense of the Government having its chief spokesman a peer ?‘ Such was the argument elaborated in every Conservative newspaper friendly — and none were unfriendly or even dubious — to Mr. Baldwin.

But it did not seem to be realized that this argument can be pushed much further. If the chief spokesman in the House of Lords is an absurdity, what of the minor spokesmen? If the House of Lords does not represent the whole nation, what part of the nation does it represent, save and except itself? If Labor has no part in the House of Lords, and is yet recognized as the second most important element in the House of Commons, how long is this anomaly to be defended? For what time is it still to be maintained that the duties of a second Chamber can be left without scandal in the hands of a body of men representing one small wealthy class — for, if we accept Labor and non-labor as the dividing lines, and deny the House of Lords its former claim of representing the nation as a whole, that is the inevitable description of the hereditary branch of the legislature. It becomes simply a soviet of the rich.

Nor is there any refuge for the dilemma of the kind dear to the compromise-loving British temperament. Labor peers cannot be created, for a variety of reasons. The peerage is founded on wealth. No man, whatever his distinction, is created a peer unless there is a reasonable presumption that he will be able to support the dignity in decency. Care is always taken, in the case of men who, while themselves comfortably off, can leave nothing to their descendants, so to arrange matters that the title will not long survive them. The formation of a poor hereditary caste—an aristocratic proletariat —has always been dreaded and guarded against in Great Britain. Therefore a Labor peer could not be, in the vast majority of cases, an hereditary peer. The majesty of England could never endure the prospect of its highest honors descending to a hand in a factory or a peddler at the street corner. The titled classes must rebel at the notion of their inherited or dearly bought distinctions being shared by agitators and demagogues. The Labor peerage, therefore, would have to be a strictly ad hoc affair. It would have to be limited certainly to the life of the peer, and probably to his term of office. But what sort of man would accept membership of the House of Lords under conditions of such invidious and derogatory limitation? Even if the Labor Party were otherwise prepared to join the present second Chamber, they would surely reject with decision, and something like anger, any proposals that they should be admitted on terms which implied their social inferiority.

But, in fact, the Labor Party cannot, without stultifying itself, consent to have anything to do with the House of Lords. Its whole philosophy is hostile to the root ideas of that Chamber. It objects to the House of Lords, not only as an unrepresentative, but as an antihuman institution. It stands for the equality of all citizens; and while it would doubtless admit the convenience of purely official titles and distinctions, it is at war with all that tends to class-stratification. If it became omnipotent it would probably retain the monarchy. It would most certainly make short work of all aristocracy. Naturally individuals rise above or fall below their creeds, and no doubt there are many worthy democrats in the Labor Party who would be greatly tickled to be called ‘Your Lordship’ by their tradesmen and housemaids. But they realize quite well that their influence would be gone the moment they consented to any formula of ennoblement. Labor’s jealousy of its own leaders is already a most important and far-reaching political fact; but if it irks the obscure shop-steward to be addressed by a Labor Privy Councillor, it is clear that a Labor Lord would be intolerable and untolerated. In brief, it would probably be perfectly easy to shovel two hundred Labor representatives into the House of Lords. But before their patents were made out, they would have become unrepresentative.

Thus the moral case for the House of Lords, weakened by the admissions of 1910, is destroyed by the admissions of 1923. That does not, of course, say that the House of Lords will go yet; logic does not rule in things English. But it must mean that the House of Lords will henceforward decline continuously in authority, power, and consideration; and that when its position is at last recognized as impossible, it cannot be ‘reformed’ on the lines made so familiar in the discussions of the ‘veto ‘ days. It must be replaced by something quite unlike itself, something in which the hereditary principle plays no part, or at least figures only as a slight flavoring.

‘At last’may be many years ahead. The probabilities are that nothing will be done, from the sheer difficulty of doing anything at once theoretically acceptable to the conservative-minded, not ridiculous to the reforming temperament, and tolerable to the practical politician. But such inaction can hardly save the House of Lords. It will become less than ever the theatre of active and vigorous protagonists; it will become more than ever the debating society of superannuated wiseacres. It has long ceased to be a chamber in which aspiring genius could find its fit atmosphere; but it did until quite lately afford an asylum for the more meditative kind of statesman who preferred, in ruling a cabinet, to be free from the constant labor of Parliamentary leadership. If, however, no Lord Curzon, however able, can hope for more than subordinate rank, there will be an end to the Curzons, and the Curzons were, after all, the one justification for the House of Lords.

V

I have dwelt on this feature of the Cabinet reconstruction because it seems to mark the beginning of a change in the British polity which must, for good or ill, have enormous influence on the future. But something should be said of a matter less significant, indeed, than the passing of Lord Curzon, — or rather than the declared reason for his passing, — but still not without a more than personal interest. Mr. Reginald McKenna’s conditional acceptance of the great post of Chancellor of the Exchequer puzzled many observers in England, and has probably not been fully apprehended abroad. Mr. McKenna began life as a most uncompromising Radical. He was, it is true, a Radical of the distinctly gentlemanly type. He belongs to the high bourgeoisie whose outlook is essentially conservative. The McKennas are now chiefly a legal family, but they are, or were, associated with a business bringing them into very intimate touch with the commercial world; and, though they have thrown up in Mr. Stephen McKenna an admirable literary artist, they retain on the whole the hard-headed character of the expansive middle class of Victorian England.

Mr. McKenna has public-school and university culture, got into the House of Commons by the good offices of the late Sir Charles Dilke, made himself a favorite of Mr. Asquith, and became successively Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He fell with his old chief, and after some stay in the cold shades, decided to leave politics for banking. As a statesman, he seemed rather like a banker; as a banker, he has revealed himself a very considerable statesman, whose disquisitions on the national finances possess far greater authority than those of any official exponent. Nothing appeared less likely than that he would sacrifice a princely salary for the uncertainty of political power and emolument. Still less possible did it appear that the former protagonist of Welsh disestablishment, the pillar of Free Trade, the framer of an Education bill which was to bring, in his own phrase, ‘not peace but a sword,’the target of innumerable Conservative shafts during the ‘ginger’ period of the war, should join a Cabinet containing a Churchman like Lord Robert Cecil and directed by a Protectionist like Mr. Baldwin.

The explanation lies in a history which, if not exactly secret, is rarely related in explicit print. Mr. McKenna has an ancient grudge against Mr. Lloyd George. That pushing statesman deprived him of the Treasury in 1908; was his special thorn during his tenancy of the Admiralty; and was in sharp opposition to him all through the first two years of the war. Mr. McKenna was for economy; Mr. George for lavishness. Mr. McKenna was prosaic and matter-of-fact: Mr. George was all intuition and vision. On the whole Mr. McKenna was probably quite right in detail and not quite right in gross; Mr. George probably saw the grand contours and nothing else. At any rate, Mr. George stayed, and Mr. McKenna went; Mr. George triumphed, Mr. McKenna suffered eclipse. The one had the glory of ‘ the man who won the war’; the other the stigma of the man through whom the war might conceivably have been lost.

Unhappily for Mr. Lloyd George, he persisted in trying also to win the peace, which was emphatically not his job, but much more suited to the less poetical temperament of Mr. McKenna. The latter is not likely to have allowed mere personal pique to influence him. His course at the Admiralty proved him a true patriot, and he is undoubtedly a man of high principle, who would not allow a mere dislike to influence his public conduct. But, if he has not seen in Mr. Lloyd George an enemy to be pursued, he has certainly viewed him, all these years, as a nuisance to be controlled and, if possible, extirpated.

Hence his dramatic appearance last October in support of the Conservative candidates for the City of London. He realized that the only hope of keeping Mr. Lloyd George out of further mischief lay in the success of Mr. Bonar Law. With a working Conservative majority Mr. George was powerless; an uncertain electoral verdict would make him master of the situation. To Mr. McKenna the one evil was more Lloyd-Georgism; compared with that, the difference between Liberalism and Conservatism was but dust in the balance.

The same motives urged him, no doubt, to agree, if his health permits, to relieve Mr. Baldwin of his main difficulty — the want of a first-class Chancellor of the Exchequer. Probably, indeed, the decisive factor with Mr. McKenna was Mr. Lloyd George’s indiscreet declaration of unlimited warfare against the new Administration. The Baldwin Government had two obvious dangers. It was weak in debating power, and its finance did not exactly satisfy those who looked to a Conservative government to effect large economies. The last budget was, on the whole, sound, but it contained neither present comfort nor future hope for the payer of direct taxes. Mr. McKenna may possibly do no better for a time; but his presence at the Treasury carries an assurance better than that of the various Bardolphs who have been there since he left it.

If Mr. McKenna is indeed strong enough to restore effective Treasury control; if he can force the Government to face Labor criticisms and defy a certain temporary unpopularity; if, after a year or two of retrenchment and prudent finance, he can effect some manipulation of debt which will relieve the taxpayer of an appreciable part of the present exorbitant burden of interest, he will end by placing the Baldwin Government in an unassailable position.

Mr. McKenna’s action is generally interpreted in England as betokening his conviction that Liberal should cooperate with Conservative against the threat of Labor. I doubt very much whether the fear of Labor so much as enters Mr. McKenna’s virile and objective mind. What he is afraid of is a return, in some form or another, of Lloyd-Georgism. With the Liberal Party as it is, a Liberal of Mr. McKenna’s views can only regard LloydGeorgism as the chief danger. Labor is unlikely to gain an independent majority. But it is conceivable that there might be a majority of advanced Liberals and Laborites, which would mean, no doubt, a rapid strategic movement of Mr. Lloyd George to the Left. And if—a very large assumption — electoral fortune should so favor the two Liberal wings as to give them an independent majority, there would still be a high probability of Mr. George returning to a position in which he could put into practice his social theories.

That, to Mr. McKenna, would be the last calamity, however it might be brought about. He quite sincerely believes — and he is by no means solitary in that conviction — that only the collapse of Lloyd-Georgism saved the country, and another dose of the same virus might, he fears, be fatal. In joining the Government he has certainly given Mr. Lloyd George the worst blow that statesman has so far received. Mr. McKenna, though no superman, — and even because he is no superman, — can supply, if his health permits, just the kind of stiffening the Baldwin Government requires. He has no powers of fascination, he can bind no spells, and even were he to perform miracles, they would be received with no particular enthusiasm. But he is trusted if he is not loved; and with many, the knowledge that he would go to the Treasury mainly to prevent Mr. Lloyd George returning to power would add largely to the satisfaction which his conditional appointment has occasioned.