His Majesty's Opposition
I
THE British Labor Party has now had a full six months’ experience as His Majesty’s Opposition. The time is too short to reveal the full strength, or betray the full weakness, of what is now the second party in the State. The first session of a new Parliament rarely tests the character of a man or a group. Apart from the lassitude which naturally succeeds the fever of a general election, there is neither motive nor opportunity for effort on a large scale. Everybody is content with measuring swords and exchanging a few experimental passes. In Opposition speeches, of course, the Government figures as the worst and weakest of modern times; its authority is challenged; the manner in which it came into existence is impugned; and it is told that what was born in corruption must expire in shame. But in practice nobody desires or works for its downfall, and everybody is ready to give it full opportunities of carrying on. A wise government, on its own side, never attempts a large or challenging programme until it has settled down; and thus an air of unreality surrounds the first proceedings of a newly elected Parliament.
The late session has been no exception to the rule, and the test through which the Labor Party has passed cannot be said to justify any final conclusions. Enough, however, has been seen to form a general idea both of the possibilities and of the limitations of the new Opposition. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, the Labor leader, recently boasted that his followers, by their Parliamentary conduct, have shown themselves ‘at least as fit to govern as men of any other party or class.’ That is a claim which even relatively friendly critics would hesitate to concede; and many would add that, since government is a much wider thing than Parliamentary management, nothing has happened, or could happen, during the past six months to disprove Mr. Churchill’s famous dictum that Labor is unfit to rule.
But whether or not his party is capax imperii, it is generally admitted that Mr. Macdonald himself is eminently qualified for all the duties which ordinarily fall to a leader of the Opposition. Many years have elapsed since there was so able, vigilant, resourceful, and pertinacious a critic of the Government on the Front Opposition bench. Mr. Asquith was more indolent, and lacked fire. Sir Donald Maclean, with equal industry, had neither the flair nor the intellectual power of Mr. Macdonald. And it must be somewhat humiliating to Mr. Lloyd George to find that, in the very department in which he might have been thought incomparable, he has so far failed to impress the House as the equal of the Labor leader. His sword, as he said last autumn, is now in his hand, and he intimated that he would ‘ mak ‘ it whustle ‘; but in fact the weapon seems a little tinny and the gladiator a little tired.
II
Mr. Ramsay Macdonald’s success has indeed surprised even his friends. Everybody knew that he was a most adroit Parliamentary chess-player. It was generally recognized, long before the war, that among the three or four men with the special gifts appropriate to a Parliamentary leader, he ranked certainly further from the bottom than the top of the list; and when, at the beginning of the session, the Labor Party passed over the claims of Mr. J. R, Clynes, there were few who did not acknowledge that its choice, showed excellent judgment, always assuming that Parliamentary dexterity was the chief need.
But though Mr. Macdonald has achieved the kind of success which might have been anticipated, its degree is none the less astonishing. Under him the Labor Party has attained a momentum, a cohesion, and a dignity to which it could not pretend when led by one or another of the solid and stolid trade-union delegates who held command in the Parliament of 19181922. And this despite the fact that wild men have abounded as never before on the Labor benches.
Mr. Macdonald’s following includes politicians of a type hitherto strange to Westminster. They have little in common with other portents of the past, like the late Keir Hardie, a thoughtful and kindly man behind his studied violence. They are not, like him, merely desirous of getting rid of certain social injustices. They aim at getting rid of society itself as at present constituted. They come to the House of Commons, as they announced on the first day of the session, resolved ‘to end all this.’ They have no sort of faith in Parliamentary government, no shred of respect for the House, no belief in the possibility of adapting it to what they conceive to be the needs of modern democracy, no wish but to smash it.
These levelers from the Clyde have made a system of obstruction, and have used insult as a weapon. On them Mr. Macdonald’s authority sits lightly, and some of them do not even acknowledge a nominal allegiance; yet the discredit attaching to their presence necessarily casts, in the eyes of a public which fails in nice discrimination, a stigma on the Party as a whole. But though he cannot prevent scenes which he deplores, Mr. Macdonald, with quiet skill, minimizes them; and it is a testimony to his adroitness that the Labor Party has distinctly gained in reputation. In the last Parliament, though it was seldom noisy, it was deemed thoroughly irresponsible. In the present Parliament, though violence has indeed been frequent, it has acquired, on the whole, a reputation for playing the Parliamentary game both skillfully and in accordance with all the rules. Mr. Macdonald recently described himself, quite justly, as ‘one of the decorous sort of people.’
Both physically and intellectually he is well qualified for the task set him. A tall handsome man, one of those rare persons who can wear rather long hair without looking affected and a sweeping moustache without looking effeminate, he has the pleasantest of voices, the most plausible of manners, and the gift (which was also Mr. Asquith’s) of imparting to a dubious case the air of complete respectability. He has studied much; he possesses a tidy habit of mind; and, without much power of original thought, — or, for that matter, of striking expression, — he is a capital debater, with a specially quick eye to the weakness of an adversary’s case, and a disconcerting way of using the tu-quoque argument to those who accuse Labor of immoral, selfish, or revolutionary aims.
Perhaps wisely, he is mostly negative, and exposes the smallest area to criticism. If possible, he does not so much dwell on the virtues of the socialistic remedy as on the fellness of the capitalistic disease. He has never defended Bolshevism. But he has given Bolshevism all the advantages of a defense by attacking its attackers. If accused of wanting to wreck society by a capital levy, he would deny, of course, that society would be wrecked; but his main reply would be that, under an orthodox Chancellor of the Exchequer, a capital levy is already in operation, but that it attacks the wrong sort, of capitalist. And when told that Labor is unfit to govern, he would ask, with mild venom, ‘What, then, is the standard of fitness? Was it reached by a Government which threw away a hundred million sterling in buying discomfiture in Russia; which left the Turk in a position to be troublesome five years after his supposed defeat; which has achieved no settlement with Germany, and has squandered in pure absence of mind millions on millions which no auditor can even trace? ‘
The sense of tactics is Mr. Macdonald’s great gift as a Parliamentarian. Few men are more adroit in framing formulæ or constructing dilemmas. He is probably second in sheer intellect to his fellow intellectual, Mr. Philip Snowden. He is certainly Mr. Snowden’s inferior in passion and strength of conviction. But while Mr. Snowden is mainly the man of ideas, Mr. Macdonald is, above all, the practical politician. Except in the single matter of ‘Pacifism,’ he has contributed little or nothing to the doctrinal stock-intrade of the Party. He has always called himself a Socialist , and he talks the commonplaces of Socialism; but if is extremely doubtful whether he has ever conjured up in his mind the vision of a socialized world, more definite in its practical details than the dreams of Bellamy and his like.
It is enough for him that the Sidney Webbs, who can be of little use elsewhere, are thinking out in the study schemes of Collectivist regimentation. His business is quite distinct. It is to get and keep together an actual Socialist Party; when that party reaches power, it will be quite time enough to take down from the pigeonholes all the schemes for the state endowment of motherhood and the minimum wage for all citizens. These things are not to lie despised, for they sound well in manifestoes. But they are and can be nothing until there is an organization to give them effect.
The whole of Mr. Macdonald’s career has been spent in nursing this project of a powerful and self-sufficient Labor organization; and the skill and tenacity with which he has pursued his object are remarkable. Even during the war, though separated in view from the majority of the Party, even during the first post-war period, though he could not obtain a seat in Parliament, he never lost grip of the controlling wires.
III
How does it happen that this Scottish ex-school-teacher, polite, well-mannered, literary, middle-class, received in all kinds of intellectual circles, a bosom friend of Mr. Lloyd George in the old Budget days, and still so much esteemed that in the fiercest controversies the late Prime Minister would not tolerate a word in his disfavor, leads a party representing four and a half million electors belonging chiefly to the ranks of the manual workers?
An answer to this question is necessary to a full understanding of the Labor position. The Labor Party is like one of the anomalous animals of mythology. Its brains are Socialist, its body is trade-unionist, its tail is Bolshevist. Though the details of this strange organization are perplexing, and incapable of being covered by any concise formula, it is easy to understand how a socialistic character has been given to a body representing great numbers of men who never heard of Karl Marx or Robert Owen.
When the trade-unions, discovering their power, decided to put forward candidates of their own, it was soon discovered that a party, to be effective, must be something more than the sum of its members. The necessity was seen of those arts which alone can convert a mob of unrelated atoms into a working, fighting organization.
To supply the need, the so-called Independent Labor Party rose into being. Its name is as little descriptive as that of the Holy Roman Empire. It is not independent, for its whole character is parasitic, though it is the kind of parasite that controls what it subsists on. It is only nominally Labor, for most of its moving spirits are middle-class intellectuals or workingmen who have long abandoned their trades. It is not, in the ordinary sense, a party, for it has neither the funds nor the organization to run any great number of candidates at its own expense. But, as a factory of ideas and a centre of intrigue, it succeeded, by its appeal to the ‘viewy’ and ambitious young men of the tradeunion world, in imposing its policy and its plan of campaign on the great craft organizations. Thus the vast funds and the far-reaching influence of the trade-unions were at the service of a knot of politicians who, of themselves, could not have won a single election. And thus it was that Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, whose hands have always been as white as a duchess’s, was for years the most powerful Labor politician.
Except for the war interval, he has mainly directed the policy of the Party, though not its nominal chief. It was due to him more than to anybody that from 1906 to 1914 a close working alliance was maintained with Liberalism. If he now falls in with the general Labor view against, future coöperation with either of the older parties, it is because he believes that Liberalism is dying, and that Labor is the natural heir to its assets. He has already appropriated most of its ideas in foreign policy, and his brain works most naturally on ‘advanced’ Liberal lines in regard to home affairs. He is a free trader. He is a convinced and almost faddish constitutionalist. He feels all Mr. Lloyd George’s affection for rich men of a particular type. The late George Cadbury, the chocolate magnate, he recently eulogized as ‘the pious knight of his time.'
The tribute is significant. To Mr. Chesterton the ‘factory in a garden’ at Bournville was simply a well and humanely managed slave estate. To Mr. Belloc such an experiment in enlightened capitalism was merely a reversion to the villa of the decaying Roman world. But to Mr. Macdonald Bournville is simply an advance model of the industrial unit of a socialized state. To produce a number of Bournvilles out of nothing, or rather out of the wreckage of all private industry, would be a gigantic business. But it might not be so difficult to strike a bargain with large capitalists on the lines, ‘Security for the worker against hunger and homelessness, security to capital against slackness and strikes.’
That, apparently, is the meaning of the new friendliness of the Labor Party, or rather of its chief spokesmen, to what may be called working as contrasted with inert capital. Mr. Snowden is careful to explain that expropriation is no dogma of Socialism. During the Snowden debate, Sir Alfred Mond was told that the socialistic state would be glad to secure his abilities at a salary of ten thousand pounds a year. Mr. Macdonald affects to believe that the better sort of capitalist will be won over to the Labor Party when he fully understands its policy.
It is true that policy is by no means easy to understand. All members of the Party, according to Mr. Snowden, are agreed that the basis of society must be changed, and that private ownership and control of productive industry must give way to public ownership and control. Mr. Macdonald has given this view his benediction. Peasant agriculture and peasant industries, he says, could still be practised under a socialistic regime, but ‘trade must be organized like a fleet or an education system.’ On the other hand we have Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb declaring, not only that all private property must be abolished, but that all citizens under the socialistic state must be equally remunerated. ‘We suggest,’ they say, ‘that the community must deliberately accept equality.’
This haziness is at once an asset and a handicap to the Labor Party. It enables it to throw its net very widely, so that it catches at once the most idealistic and the most realistic people in the kingdom. But it sets against Labor all that vast mass of opinion, by no means confined to the middle and upper classes, which is simply concerned to have a rational Government, which knows its own mind and whose course of action can be predicated.
It is not a question of mere timid shrinking from heroic measures. The unheroic measures are too uncomfortable for any such squeamishness to be general. The average income-taxpayer is in the position of a bullock being slowly absorbed by a boaconstrictor. No being in that, predicament is likely to be shocked by the prospect of somebody else losing a leg or an arm by the sudden bite of a tiger, and if he could be assured that such sacrifice would give him freedom and life he would soon develop a vivid interest in the tiger party. But in the absence of conviction on that point, he must remain apathetic; and the trouble with the Labor Party is that it carries no conviction of relief to those who are suffering from bad trade, unemployment, or overtaxation.
Take, for example, the capital levy. Nine people out of ten would vote Labor, merely because it stood for a capital levy, if they had any confidence in the general goodness of Labor faith and the general soundness of Labor economics. For, while it is only a very select minority which would be directly affected by the capital levy, there is an enormous number of people in good social position who groan under an excessive income-tax. A capital levy of a most oppressive kind is, indeed, in actual operation, and has been for six or seven years past. Men who in normal times would be saving a fourth part of a fairly large income for the support of their declining years are now forced to pay their whole surplus to the Exchequer. If they reposed any sort of faith in the economics of Snowden and Webb, and the honesty of Labor administration, they would certainly not be frightened by the finest bogey investment-holders could devise.
But no case has ever been made out for the capital levy, and the economics of the Labor Party are otherwise so manifestly absurd that no sensible person will take chances. The callous lack of sympathy which the Labor Party invariably shows where the middle-class income-taxpayer is concerned should alone be sufficient to defeat Mr. Ramsay Macdonald’s hope of any large accession of strength from the black-coated wage-earner.
IV
It is true that such material considerations might not be final if the Labor Party possessed, even with its dubious programme, a man capable of appealing to the imagination of the country.
After all, it stands for an ideal, and ideals are scarce in the post-bellum England. Liberalism has, temporarily at least, lost its soul. Conservatism has only one animating motive which is not connected with class interest, and Imperialism makes little appeal to-day to a people more conscious of the cost of its commitments than of the glory of its position in the world. Labor alone, with all its shortcomings, and the dubious character of its motives, has a message to which, if adequately stated, the mind and heart of the country could respond.
But it is precisely in the realm of imagination that Labor fails. I have dwelt on the mental equipment of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald because he appears to me to represent at once the strength and the weakness of the Labor Party. Its strength is exactly that which might be least expected. It excels in intellectual vitality, in power of organization, in capacity for management and intrigue. Considering the necessarily anomalous character of the Labor machine, considering the unruly and heterogeneous mob of units brought together under men who are really almost usurpers, it is a marvel of contrivance. Practical statesmanship of a high order is essential to the mere preservation of unity and balance; and the habit of working miracles daily and almost hourly has given the Labor managers an uncanny tact and dexterity.
Thought, moreover, is forced on every man who would keep his place in the Labor world. He may and does often think in a most confused fashion, but think somehow he must. He cannot, like members of the other parties, settle down comfortably with a small selection of prejudices, to be defended with a smaller selection of platitudes. There is, Heaven knows, plenty of platitude in Labor speeches, but it is never pure platitude. There is always a due seasoning of fact and practical experience. The Labor man may be weak in logic, but he is pretty sure to be strong on figures. He may fail in the arrangement of a syllogism, but he can quote a bluebook. The theory of rent may be unknown to him, but he cannot be hoodwinked as to the practice of landlords. He may not know much about the law of diminishing returns, but he is fully cognizant of the means by which real profits increase while nominal dividends seem to grow smaller. He who sets out to argue against the Labor Party without very definite knowledge of what he is talking about will be wise to confine himself to generalities. In no conflict is a slip in detail more likely to give an opening for telling riposte.
The one thing in which the Labor Party is deficient is exactly that in which it might be imagined to abound. It has no inspired, persuasive, juicy demagogy. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is a fine Parliamentarian and an able schemer. He is not, in the broader sense, a great party leader. That cool temper of the duelist and intriguer which makes him a master of House of Commons attack and defense, which gives him his eye for tactic, and enables him to pull wires with consummate skill, withholds from him the kind of power which sets on fire a popular audience.
It is the same elsewhere. The ultrademocrats have no super-demagogues. Mr. J. R. Clynes is an admirable debater, lucid and cogent, with a terrier-like talent — in strict congruity with his whole terrier-like personality — of seizing a point like a bone, getting all the meat off it, and leaving it speedily clean, wagging his tail meanwhile with meek and disarming geniality. But he has no kind of fire as a platform speaker. Mr. J. H. Thomas performs miracles of diplomacy in his capacity as General Secretary of the National Union of Railway Workers, who present him on an average with three Lausannes a year; he can argue well any concrete case; and he possesses the amazing fluency of Wales; but though he has the spate, he has not the glory of words. Mr. Arthur Henderson soothes with the respectable eloquence of the chapel. Mr. Snowden, with a fine gift of expression, is not a popular speaker; there is about him a bitterness, a bleak hostility, a thin acidity that has no winning efficacy; for the rest, Dean Inge is not more an intellectual.
In short the whole Party contains nobody who could by the furthest licence of language be called an orator. Possibly the extreme respectability of the Labor leaders checks rhetorical expansion. But it is curious that wealthy and aristocratic recruits equally lack the true Promethean fire. Mr. Ponsonby and Mr. Trevelyan have high soporific qualities, and Mr. Patrick Hastings, K.C., whose eloquence earns twenty or thirty thousand a year in the Law Courts, is a stick on the platform and a dinner-bell in the House of Commons.
This is a serious matter for Labor, which must proselytize on a large scale if it is ever to be in a position to govern as an independent entity — and its present resolution is against any kind of coalition. Labor is by no means in the assured electoral position which its attainment of the position of official Opposition might suggest. It owes something over 140 seats to the casting of some four million votes. The two Liberal factions, polling practically the same number, obtained only 120 seats; while the Conservatives, favored by threecornered contests, secured 3o0 seats for five million and a quarter votes. Thus, out of something over thirteen million votes, only four millions were given for Labor candidates. The true facts are rather more unfavorable than would appear from this crude statement, since there were a very great number of uncontested Conservative constituencies, and many Liberals voted for Labor in divisions which were left uncontested by Asquithians and the Lloyd George party. But the mere figures as they stand suffice to show how unreal, on the present facts, are the apprehensions of a sweeping victory for Labor as the result of any ordinary ‘swing of the pendulum’ against Conservatism.
Labor, with considerably less than a third of the electorate on its side, has a task much more formidable than is generally assumed, and has need of all the tact and enthusiasm it can command. But its tact is not enthusiastic, and its enthusiasm is not tactful. It has no plain and potent cry to win people. Only a very special temperament can thrill over the constructive formulæ of Socialism. The average man’s heart beats no faster when he is told that Labor stands for the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Mr. Sidney Webb’s gospel lacks simplicity and overabounds in statistics; and the temperature of his new Collectivist Heaven is hardly higher than that of the old Scandinavian Hell.
But while it takes a connoisseur to appreciate the constructive glories of Socialism, people of quite ordinary tastes and perceptions are easily disturbed by its destructive ideals. These ideals, expounded from very low stumps by very small stumporators, give the Party a great deal of its motive power; but they also frighten the very classes that the leaders wish to attract. Men like Mr. Macdonald see quite clearly that Labor can reach power only by gaining that lower-middle-class opinion which was the chief popular support of Liberalism. But while they speak fair, the street orator breathes fire against the bourgeois, and, unhappily, he is at once more precise and more interesting than his betters. What proceeds from the Labor head makes people yawn; but everybody marks the vicious movements of the Labor tail, and infers a basilisk disposition in the whole animal.
V
Were the times normal, there would be little chance, with the present policy of the Labor Party, for the success of Mr. Macdonald’s effort to bring into it ‘men and women of all classes — the finest men and the finest women in the whole country.’ It must, however, be allowed that the present situation contains elements which, with dexterous exploitation, might conceivably yield Labor a majority.
The plight of Liberalism is its great opportunity. Not only is Liberalism paralyzed by a disputed succession: even more serious is the fact that it has no very obvious cause. Of the reforms which were its pre-war stock-in-trade some are accomplished and others are manifestly incapable of accomplishment in the present financial conditions. The franchise can be extended no further. The plural vote is gone. Ireland is self-governing. On the other hand, the ‘free breakfast table’ is a clear impossibility. The old Liberal ideas are obsolete, and there seems to be no new Liberal idea.
There may arise a chief and a creed to regenerate Liberalism, but undoubtedly some danger exists that it may gently disintegrate, the moderates going to reinforce Conservatism, and the more fiery spirits seeking a spiritual home with Labor. When Captain Guest, the Liberal Whip who helped to engineer the ‘coupon’ (election of 1918), takes the view that Liberalism is now only ‘an attitude of mind’ and ‘a political expression,’ we have at least to give this painless and insensible dissolution of Liberalism a place among political possibilities. In any case Liberalism is for some years likely to be depressed and helpless, and Labor stands to be the gainer by that fact.
There remain to be considered the conservative elements in society, which are much wider than the actual Conservative Party. These are naturally strong enough to defeat any party pledged to a programme of innovation which makes appeal to no strong passion and rouses no splendid expectation. The average British workman, no less than the average middle-class man, tends strongly to the status quo. He is of the opinion of the old lady who refused to be comforted by the curate’s glowing description of the joys of the hereafter. ‘It may be as you say, sir,’ she replied, ‘ but what I’ve always said is, Old England for me.’ Old England, with some reasonable improvements, is good enough for the majority of Englishmen. It is really very difficult to persuade an Englishman that he belongs to the International Proletariat. He will say so, many times and most glibly, but he does not believe it; and the foreignness which flavors most Socialist propaganda is to a large extent its own antidote.
Much depends on the Conservative Party. If it can make up its mind to sacrifice, on the principle, if not in the form, of the capital levy; if it can free the taxpayer who produces from a considerable part of his obligation to the tax-eater, who merely consumes; if it can make a clean sweep of many ancient anomalies and injustices which even the most conservatively minded resent (for example, while the owner of small property is robbed by rentrestriction acts, the great ground landlords are making exorbitant sums out of the renewal of old leases); if it can, in a word, prove itself a truly national government, Labor will never rule until it has shed much and clarified more in its policy.
But it is difficult to be enthusiastic for the mere status quo in an impoverished and tax-ridden country which can yet afford ‘ record Ascots ‘ and ‘seasons of unparalleled brilliance.’ The average citizen has fallen on a fatalistic apathy. There is no interest in politics. There is no hope in politics. It is assumed that the reign of mess and muddle, extravagant expenditure and high taxation, merely to keep going, is of the fixed and unchangeable order of things.
There was a moment of relief when Mr. Lloyd George left, a sense of thankfulness that at least we were rid of the ‘first-class brains.’ But the second-class brains afford no positive joy. Mr. Baldwin’s Government so far is just what Mr. Bonar Law’s was. It is not unpopular. It is not popular. It rouses no emotion of any kind.
It is in this apathy that the hope of Labor resides. It, at least, has ideas. It, at least, has hopes. It, at least, is warmly interested in politics. It, at least, thinks, if confusedly, and cares, if only to wreck things. Outside there is no interest, thought, or hope, only a dull acquiescence in the assurances of governing persons that their whips will be outclassed by the Labor scorpions, and that the loins of Mr. Baldwin at the Exchequer are thinner than would be the little finger of Mr. Sidney Webb.
There is, in short, no likelihood that England will consciously and of choice ‘go Labor,’ however sweetly Mr. Macdonald may woo and however convincingly Mr. Robert Smillie may promise to be quite good and constitutional. But there is just a possibility that a few years of dull, uninspired, muddling, and wasteful government, of enormous taxation, of unchecked profiteering, and uncurbed extravagance, with the hordes of pensioners, investors, and idlers generally preying on the industrious classes, may so destroy the vitality of the older parties that Labor will win, as Ivanhoe did in his last fight against the Templar, by virtue simply of being alive.