J. Ramsay Macdonald

I

FEW are the picturesque figures in contemporary British politics. One highly, perhaps perilously, endowed with that quality vanished from the scene when James Ramsay MacDonald died last November. Politically, it is true, he was already dead. With singular swiftness the fierce and vivid limelight that played on him in the autumn of 1931 when he broke the Labor Party in order to set up the National Government, and made him the hero of his country, faded out; he ceased to count long before Stanley Baldwin, least picturesque of men, replaced him in the Premiership in 1935. His speeches had become confused, confusing, and almost unintelligible; interviewers and members of deputations came away baffled and often saddened by the obvious eclipse of his reasoning faculties and the visible impossibility of holding his attention.

In 1935, his courage in facing certain electoral defeat at Seaham Harbor revived memories of the virtue that had above all others distinguished him in the past; he came back to the House of Commons in the not too appropriate capacity of M. P. for the Scottish Universities, and then, as Lord President of the Council, took a large and appreciative part in the ceremonies of the Coronation. That function over, however, his disappearance from the Cabinet excited little notice; it was but part of a gradual fading, like that of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. His death at sea, a few months later, was, as were so many incidents in his career, dramatic. It called forth national tributes imposing in extent. Comment, however, was perplexed. There was a marked and quite general unreadiness to sum up, in any considered judgment, a career that covered forty crucial and challenging years or a personality that had, throughout their course, been a focus of keen interest.

Here was a man who, rising from the humblest ranks on the wings of outstanding abilities, had three times been Prime Minister, and twice Prime Minister at the head of a new party which he, in the course of his own lifetime, largely created; a man, too, of vivid personal coloring, more definitely and constantly ‘front-page news’ than almost any of his contemporaries; a man about whom everyone who encountered him felt strongly either in attraction or, more rarely, in repulsion. Yet the press obituaries, while long, were tame and indistinct. Experienced writers produced columns of print in which they noticeably refrained from coming to any conclusions about their subject. In Parliament the speeches were dignified, and, from every quarter, in perfect taste, but again entirely noncommittal. Elision ruled them all. Speakers from Conservative benches passed tactfully over the war period and stressed the great services of 1931; Labor speakers said nothing of 1931, but harked back to 1901, to 1914, to 1924. No one was ready to join up the pieces into a coherent picture. The B. B. C. could prevail on no colleague of standing from any period in the dead statesman’s long and richly diversified career to speak of him on the air. No one was ready to risk anticipating the verdict of history on the politician; no one was willing to express a personal judgment on the man.

Behind this well-mannered reserve toward, and general suspension of, final attribution lies genuine and persistent puzzlement. People really do not know what to say, because they do not know what to think. In private they talk, as throughout his life they talked, endlessly and incessantly about him. It used to be said that if two or three members of his own party were gathered together it was a safe guess they were talking of MacDonald; on that theme they would go on until the cows came home. They might be, and often were, highly critical; but if, at any time up to the autumn of 1931, he joined the talkers, all hung on his words — felt, too, that the light somehow went up when he came in. Moreover, not even the most dogmatic of his critics was ever sure that he was right in his analysis. At every period of his life, indeed, MacDonald perplexed most those who, through close association with him in work, knew, or should have known, him best. Uncertainty in judgment moved in direct ratio to closeness of contact; between private impression and public there was, at all stages, a singular gulf.

On great audiences, at home and abroad, he made a clear, vivid, and warm impression — an impression entirely congruous with the noble black and white of his distinguished personal appearance, and the rich music of his marvelous voice. Men felt in him that high light of inspiration and that warm glow of personal magnetism which clothe the orator, for his hearers’ imaginations, with the mantle of the prophet. He lifted politics into a higher and rarer air than any of his colleagues or his opponents, except very occasionally, could reach.

On the platform he had, at his best, a unique authority. His tones evoked pictures; they moved the mind as music does. Reports of his speeches never corresponded to the effect they made upon those who heard him; phrases could, of course, be captured, but not the mood they evoked, or the total effect of a kind of contact in which he was an artist. Audiences came away sure they had been in touch with a man of more than common moral and mental stature; his hold over them was almost unfailing. This applied to the great public meeting; it also applied to more instructed gatherings, like the Labor Party conference. There he always had his opponents and his critics, but always beat them; there, to the last, his hold was unshakable. It applied much less forcibly to the House of Commons.

He was fond of saying that he was a House of Commons man; he proved the sincerity of this statement, to the surprise and disappointment of his enemies, when he refused to move up to the House of Lords in 1937. He believed in House of Commons methods; he had a complete mastery of procedure there, and a reverence for the ancient, complicated ritual. But in the House he only rarely made a really effective speech; certainly never, except of a ceremonial kind, after 1929. There the auditors were, somehow, too near. He did not excite, uplift, or thrill them, on either side of the House; nine times out of ten, indeed, he baffled them; they did not know what to make of what he said, were not sure of what he was at. The impression was the puzzled, ambiguous one that appears in the obituary notices.

A French proverb asserts that a door has got to be either open or shut. His door, however, was at once open and shut. A frankness in speech that seemed positively heedless coexisted with an elusiveness that could never be pinned down and a reticence that could not be penetrated beyond a certain point. He talked, enormously, about himself, but always in a curiously externalized fashion, as though he were somebody else, looking on at the perpetual pageant of J. Ramsay MacDonald. He would talk, in this strain, to anybody, so that his interlocutor often had the feeling that, were he to get up and go away, someone else taking his place, MacDonald simply would not notice the change. Those dark eyes, alternately brooding and brilliant, those features carved in ivory, and that moving, musical voice bespoke a man of moods, of temperament, of mystic visitations, a man with an inner life no one might share. Was he anything of the sort? In the end, most of those who ever came near him doubted whether, if he had a secret, he knew what it was.

II

A man’s actions, when their toll is completed, speak of him in a language that should give interpretation authority. Certainly Ramsay MacDonald’s career registers will, grit, vitality, and courage, in high degree. He started with everything against him. Born in a remote part of Scotland, he knew poverty in its harshest guise. He used to attribute the untirable feet that were such an asset to him on long mountain tramps to the years of boyhood, when he had worn no shoes. He went barefoot to a small country school, and left it at the time when his later associates were many of them just beginning their serious education. Yet by the time he appeared before the public he had given himself a culture that could match that of the most fortunate.

Stage by stage — through hard work, never intermitted — he rose to political distinction, leader of a new and challenging party in Parliament. A dark period of notoriety followed, in which, pilloried for unpopular conviction by the vast majority, he became a hero with a small minority, and, within a few years of being presented as Devil-in-chief to his countrymen by every organ of the press, rose to the highest position they can grant a citizen. He rose as the indispensable leader of a party as new in organization as in political creed, and, five years after its first experiment in government, led it back again to the seats of authority. Then, in 1931, at a moment of supreme political and economic crisis, he stood out as the indispensable man, not to party but to nation, in whose name and for whose sake he broke his party.

Here certainly is an outline to capture the interest. When its detail is filled in, the story is not less arresting. Yet on the very threshold one meets the recurrent question mark. To the last he withheld from any handbook, however official, — as from any writer, however sympathetic, — the facts about his birth. Everyone knew that he was born into poverty such as only tough fibre survives; that, leaving school when he entered his teens, he toiled in the fields of Lossiemouth, as did his mother, until his farsighted dominie brought him back to continue his education as a pupil teacher; that at eighteen, with no more in his wallet than had Dick Whittington, he fared south and walked the hard streets of London in search of a job, finally found as an invoice clerk at twelve shillings a week. Circumstances here to make and keep romantic his subsequent rise and amazing self-training.

Of these early hardships he spoke freely enough. Of his mother he spoke always with deep admiration. As soon as he could he built her a house in Lossiemouth, and took his own wife and children there year by year for holidays. But right up to the time of his death hardly anyone knew, and no one ever knew from him, who or what his father was. That he was an illegitimate child was known, of course. During the war his enemies made ample play with this; Horatio Bottomley published his birth certificate at the time of the Woolwich by-election in 1920 — in order thereby to finish off the pacifist and pro-German. Beyond the mere fact, however, there was no knowledge. Some, who knew him well, held that he was acutely sensitive on the matter; they later referred his otherwise astonishingly naïve satisfaction in ‘high’ society to that hidden wound. Further, they were apt to imply that his handsome person and bearing revealed him as the unacknowledged scion of some exalted house. Various houses were named by those who claimed to know secrets. He said nothing; he neither affirmed nor denied.

Yet in the somewhat tawdry romanticism of this attribution there was, in fact, no truth; whereas the true story holds a note of genuine distinction. His mother, a girl of great beauty and strong character, was plighted to a young man in her own station. They were to marry; she discovered that her lover was not of the character or calibre she wanted in the father of her child. Therefore she refused to marry him. Courage of a rare kind, here. The date was 1866; the place, a Presbyterian Scottish village. Proudly she carried it through. Her mother, who had been in ‘good ’ service, in the exalted houses of the legend, helped her to care for her baby; she told him tales of the grand world she had known. To his mother, the son gave devoted affection; hardly, however, full understanding. Had he given that, he might have done something, later, to break down the cruel injustice that handicaps the disinherited. Perhaps it is to his grandmother that one must refer the conventionality of view that kept him silent while mythical marquesses were given him as father.

Conventionality — that strain runs right through. The extent to which, always, he minded what other people thought, and desired to have them all think well of him, enhances the courage which, on notable issues and occasions, went against the current. That he, in fact, shared most of his habitual opinions with the majority was an element in his strength. He thought, for instance, — as do most Britishers, quite irrespective of religious conviction or the lack of it, — about Rome. He saw the Scarlet Woman approaching at the time of the Prayer Book controversy; he said, once, that the only circumstance that could, and must finally, separate him from any of his children would be their adopting that faith. No other action would he condemn in advance; on that he was adamant.

His social notions were equally naïve. He loved contact with the aristocracy. He loved every aspect of the ceremonial of office and authority. No pressure from his party could have induced him to abstain from dining at Buckingham Palace, or dining there in Court dress. He liked it æsthetically; he liked, further, the hierarchical view it represented. A society in ordered tiers, mounting to a pinnacle of gold and glass, appealed to his imagination and satisfied his taste. Moreover, there was history in it, and his sense of history was acute and constant. This note sounds through his writing and his speaking, from first to last. He used to attribute to his early biological studies his belief that the present unfolds itself, always, out of the past, with no breaks or jumps.

Certainly, he believed in gradualism long before Sidney Webb coined the word. His belief, however, relates not so much to his reading of Hugh Miller as to something fundamental in his makeup. Not only was he possessed by the sense of inexorable fatality that is apt to partner the student of historical process; he had, and was governed by, an extraordinarily constant awareness of the time category itself. No man was ever more rigorously ruled by the clock. At any appointment his mind was busy overtaking the next; part of him was always moving away from here, to there. He had the incurable restlessness of one perpetually catching trains. Adventure might always be waiting round the corner; any post might bring it. His expectations of the postman were childlike — another ticker here marking off the intervals in the hour glass, which, threatening and fascinating, haunted him always.

His early inclinations towards a scientific career were deflected by a breakdown in health; soon afterwards a post as secretary to Thomas Lough, a Radical M. P., carried him straight into the currents in which he was destined to swim. He met, in the New Fellowship, the men and women who were to make the Fabian Society; he collogued with London Scots, and it was as secretary to their Home Rule association that he wrote to Keir Hardie, very soon after the latter had founded the Independent Labor Party in Bradford, in 1893, and offered himself as a member.

Hardie formed the I. L. P. with a definite purpose. It was to be the instrument for converting the trade-unions — then in the throes of the New Unionism — to political action, and persuading them that they needed a political party for that purpose. Contact with Hardie was to set MacDonald’s future course for him. Hardie quickly discerned the intellectual gifts of the young man whom he made his chief lieutenant; at the time when his influence was strongest with MacDonald, it was powerfully reënforced from another quarter. As one of Hardie’s small band of stalwarts, he fought Southampton as a parliamentary candidate in 1896. That candidature brought him into personal relations with a young woman, as simple and direct as he was complex and fluid, who fell in love with him, married him, and brought him the economic security that made possible the political career for which she saw him destined. Margaret Gladstone came from the intellectual middle classes. She was a natural Socialist, with a strong and unperplexed sureness that her beliefs were right. Her clear, unwavering integrity profoundly influenced her husband’s decisive political years.

It did so the more effectually that her views were entirely in line both with Hardie’s burning idealism and with the simple directness of purpose of another individual with whom contact began in 1900 and lasted almost unbroken for thirty-odd years after. This was Arthur Henderson. Henderson, with his wholly different background, his trade-union authority and local government experience, became treasurer of the Labor Representation Committee (out of which the Labor Party developed in 1906) when MacDonald was made its secretary in 1899. The association thus begun was of dayto-day closeness up to 1911, when Henderson became secretary and MacDonald, largely through Henderson’s insistence, leader of the parliamentary Labor Party, and, wholly through his insistence, a leader not subject, as had been the case before, to annual reëlection. Henderson, authentic representative of the workers organized in tradeunions who make the backbone of the Labor Party, steadily restrained their restive suspicions of MacDonald. He admired his mental gifts, wide knowledge, and political capacity without reserve or jealousy.

From the first, Henderson saw the new party as a party. It took long to clear from his brilliant associate’s mind the inclination to see it merely as a group. So, in 1910, MacDonald toyed with the notion of taking it into a coalition — a project that broke on the inflexible contempt of Henderson and his dry query, ‘Have you consulted with Keir Hardie?’ Henderson, again, safeguarded MacDonald’s position on the party executive, and so kept him in its inner counsels, despite all disagreements on the war.

III

The war is a chapter by itself in MacDonald’s story; and a chapter that might seem, of itself, to refute any charge of conventionality of mind. He then endured in its extreme form the ordeal of bitter unpopularity. He endured it alone — his wife died in 1911. Against the passionate devotion of the few he had to set alienation from the majority in his own party, and loud detestation from the mass of the nation at war. For them he was, at best, a blind fanatic; at worst, a simple traitor. In these years he showed fortitude and a high courage the more admirable that his personal sensitiveness never hardened into indifference to abuse. It is no belittlement of that courage and that fortitude to add that his stand was, essentially, a negative one. To what one may call the philosophy of pacifism he made no contribution. He was against the war, because of the mistaken foreign policy of Grey which had led up to it, and the poor strategy by which it was being conducted.

At first, he was not with the minority who refused to take any part in recruiting. He desired to go out with the Red Cross himself, although in this he was thwarted; his eldest son, Alistair, served with the Friends Ambulance Unit. He was never an absolutist: he never stood for the conscientious objectors in the sense that Arthur Ponsonby and Philip Snowden did. Association with a small and derided minority pushed him, stage by stage, nearer to the full pacifist position, but he never took it without reserve; it was too alien to the temper of a natural fighter. He said finer things about peace than anybody else did, and finer things about war; but they were, in the main, negative things. And, although he very early took the line that there must be a formulation of democratic peace terms, he was much slower than Arthur Henderson to realize the significance of the idea of the League of Nations as their guarantee, and for long remained lukewarm and half-hearted about it.

His, however, was the challenging figure. As the war dragged on, with its disillusionments, its mounting holocaust of life and idea, and the centre of the Labor Party swung gradually nearer to his critical position, gathering to itself Liberals as well as non-party persons who demanded a peace of reconciliation on Wilsonian lines, he was, more and more visibly, its spearhead.

In the 1918 general election, he, like every other candidate who dared to take a decent view, was swept out by the unscrupulous tactics of Lloyd George; but that election distorted rather than represented public opinion. The swing over began at once, with the formulation of vengeful Peace Terms at Versailles. The Berne Socialist Conference in 1919 was far nearer to the life-and-death currents of post-war Europe; MacDonald assumed a natural leadership on the burning issue of Democracy versus Dictatorship, which rent the conference. Here he was on the kind of ground where he was at his strongest. The pull of the new Russia was, for a stage, potent even within the Labor Party, and especially within the I. L. P., with which throughout the war he had been peculiarly associated. He set himself to stem the drift to Communism, and succeeded.

Never had he been more vigorous, never more eloquent with voice and pen, than in his speeches and writings in defense of constitutional and democratic Socialism against Bolshevism. Indeed, in many ways the years between 1918 and 1924 represent high-water mark in his political activity. Until 1922 he was out of the House of Commons, and his speeches went largely unreported in the press; but the effect of those speeches, and of his writings, was far-reaching. Already a hero with the left wing, because of his pacifism and the abuse that it brought him, he now became something of a hero with the centre and the right because of his vigorous and effective championship of trade-unionism against Sovietism, and of constitutional methods against revolution. In his finally successful battle against Communism in Britain, the by-election he fought at Woolwich in 1920 marks a decisive stage. The Communists there entered the fray against him; after that the Labor Party had no use for them. Henderson, who had got him adopted for Woolwich that he might resume what he called his ‘natural place’ as leader in Parliament, carried the Labor Conference with him in a motion to refuse affiliation to the Communist Party, as later in one to refuse admission to individual Communists as members. From this time on, though Communists might trouble, they never seriously threatened the unity of the Labor Party or blinded the public outside it, despite enormous Tory efforts, to the fact that constitutional Socialism is the antithesis of Russian Communism.

In 1922, the left wing, led by the Clydeside M. P.’s, claimed to have secured his election as leader of the party in Parliament; they were very soon to be in revolt on the ground of his excessively right-wing approach to domestic problems. In the main, however, he enjoyed in these years, and right up to 1930, the enthusiastic support of the main body in his party: a kind and degree of popularity there such as no one else could challenge or sought to challenge. His personality, and the belief in his tested sincerity, — as proved by what he had gone through during the war, — gave the party distinction and status in the public mind; the startling result of the election of December 1923, which called on Labor to form a government, was accepted without panic, in an atmosphere of tense and mainly sympathetic interest.

This first essay at government was, on the whole, successful. MacDonald himself, in his handling of Poincaré, of the London Conference, and of issues at Geneva, made a brilliant impression. He took his new honors and his new popularity with dignity. He made good speeches; he revealed a cultivated mind, streaked, agreeably, with poetry; his diplomacy was effective. But after nine months the government went out under a cloud of his making. At no time in full sympathy with the demand of the party for recognition of and a trade treaty with Soviet Russia, he let himself, on this issue and on the dropping of government prosecution of a Communist named Campbell, be manœuvred into a position where the temptation to get on his high horse and ride away proved too strong for him.

The 1924 election was, from every point of view, a mistake. It was a mistake to have it; and it was handled badly, especially by the Premier. Not the famous Letter in which Zinoviev urged British Communists to greater exertion, including tampering with the army, but the accompanying Foreign Office Note which MacDonald drafted — although its precipitate publication was without his authorization — cut the ground from under the feet of Labor candidates. Since he, with fine loyalty, refused to blame the Foreign Office, many colleagues openly, and more privately, blamed him for the entire affair. Philip Snowden was among these; he came to Henderson and urged him to take over the leadership. Henderson absolutely refused; indeed, he devoted himself to reëstablishing the confidence of the party in MacDonald and in itself by giving it a definite programme of action, in the famous document Labour and the Nation.

The years 1924 to 1929 were difficult years, whose most remarkable feature was the recovery made by Labor from defeat on the political and disaster on the industrial field. In the mining lockout of 1926 and the events of the so-called General Strike, MacDonald’s part was the only one possible to a political leader. He, like many trade-unionists, backed a movement in whose success he could not believe, which yet had, as someone put it, to be ‘got out of the system’ by trial and error. There were recriminations, of course; nevertheless, ranks closed, and when the election came, in 1929, the party profited by the growing sense in the country that spineless government at home had been accompanied by needless weakness abroad. Labor won seats as much on the foreign as on the domestic chapters in Labour and the Nation. It was in the foreign field that the second Labor Government was to win its major success.

Of that success, too much went to the account of the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Henderson. MacDonald did not want to give Henderson the post, which he regarded as peculiarly his own; nor did Henderson’s achievement cause him any keen satisfaction, least of all when it began to be contrasted with the failures of the government as a whole — above all, with its failure to cope with the mounting tide of unemployment. This was a portent at whose significance he began to look, long before it developed to crisis in the late summer of 1931.

IV

MacDonald, supposed by those who did not know him to be a temperamental mystic, was, of course, nothing of the kind. He was, indeed, the reverse of that: a long-headed and coolly calculating strategist. Conventional rather than creative in the field of idea, he was a political executant of quite remarkable talent, skill, and resource. His action in relation to the problems that confronted him in 1930 and 1931 cannot be explained on the idealist hypothesis, which never really fitted him; on what he might have called the realist one, it can.

The Labor view is that he betrayed his Socialist convictions in the interest of personal power; or that he never really entertained such convictions. This view is, in either chapter, much too simple. So is the National view that he simply and nobly sacrificed personal feeling in order to serve and save his country — although this latter explanation is much nearer to his own account of the matter. The National view further suggests that his action was extemporized in relation to a sudden, overwhelming crisis, whereas Labor in the main sees him as, in part, the architect of crisis — anyhow, planning his own action in relation to it well ahead.

Ahead he always looked. His constant time sense compelled him to do so. As 1930 wore on, the prospect before him, if events took their normal, predictable course, was exceedingly unattractive. The Labor Government might last into 1932 — hardly beyond that. When an election came, the party would be defeated. That meant the wilderness of Opposition, for an indefinite period. As leader in that rôle he had never wholly satisfied his party; he found it personally uncongenial — increasingly uncongenial, after experience of office; the more uncongenial since he was, every day, becoming more critical of his associates, whether in the Cabinet or among the rank and file. He liked them less and less. They were a lot of sentimentalists, who could not, or would not, face realities.

The grimmest of these realities was unemployment. That during the second period pressed on him, as Prime Minister, with the more painful weight because he was not, and never had been, an economist. He had not had that training; his head was not of that shape. Moreover — and this was more serious — he had never had any real confidence in the economists of his own party. His attitude to trained minds there was always hostile. In succession, he antagonized them. J. A. Hobson, old friend as he was, was cold-shouldered and never consulted; the Webbs he always disliked; G. D. H. Cole was snubbed; for the younger Cambridge school he had nothing but derision; Laski he frankly detested. There was an Economic Advisory Council, with admirable minds upon it; he never used them. He could not talk their language, and was unwilling to confess it.

This abstention from contact with the thinkers and experts on his own side, or what might have been presumed to be his own side, in effect handed him over, tied and bound, to the business magnates and other important persons, and the orthodox among the civil servants, by whose professional negativism and skepticism he allowed himself to be overwhelmed. He took these at their face value; he further believed every tale brought to him of profiteering by the unemployed or abuses of the insurance system. This had its grave emotional significance and effect. It was, however, less serious than its concomitant — a progressive acceptance of the unworkability of any plan of radical change, in any department.

Here we are at the heart of the trouble; for here intellectual conventionality and historic fatalism swung together into play, and found a sinister ally in an indurated habit of talking in Socialist generalities while refusing to translate them, or permit them to be translated, into positive and practical terms. MacDonald’s own writings and speeches afford ample confirmation of this habit of his. Throughout his life, from the nineties right up to 1929, he wrote, as well as spoke, copiously on Socialism; there are a row of books on our shelves with his name on their backs: Socialism and Society, Socialism and Government, The Socialist Movement, Socialism, Critical and Constructive — and the rest. Vigorous polemic in them all. But their best pages are the negative ones — those where he is attacking false conceptions, and explaining what Socialism is not. He kept a firm foot on Marxism; he rejected Syndicalism, Guild Socialism, and Functionalism; he destroyed Communism. But how much by way of a positive Socialist creed or plan of action can one now, could anyone ever, extract from these pages? How much guidance as to what a Socialist government would or should do? Very little. Brilliant in attack, they are constructively sterile. There is more concrete Socialism in Labour and the Nation than in all these volumes; and he always disliked Labour and the Nation and hated to be reminded of it.

It is not true to say that he did not believe in Socialism. He did believe in it, possibly to the very last. But he did not believe that it would work — least of all when he was in a position where he had a chance to make it work. Theory and action would not come, for him, into connection. He never thought his generalities through, into the terms of practical application. To each presented case of such application, his reaction was critical, if not definitely hostile. His attitude here is not, of course, uncommon. It is that, after all, of most Christians. They, like him, believe in their creed, but not in its application. Like them, too, he remained unaware of the contradiction plain enough to others. He saw only the positive half of his position — his generalized Socialist faith. His onetime followers of course saw only the negative half— his failure or refusal to apply it. Yet the two halves coexisted.

So, in August 1931, when he broke the party he had helped to create and twice led to government, he felt that, in saving his country, he was acting as a Socialist, while those who refused to impose the 10 per cent cut in Unemployment Insurance, made, as he later said, a ‘condition of borrowing’ by foreign lenders, were not. Had he said that crises occur when a responsible statesman has to act, here and now, as best he can, when there is, literally, no time to think of principles, many could have forgiven who could not forgive what they saw as the hypocrisy of killing a Socialist party in the name of Socialism. If the thing had to be done, let Baldwin and the Tories, who believed in it, do it, they cried. There, however, they asked the impossible of MacDonald. The force that carries a man to the Premiership is in part a belief that only he can do it. MacDonald was in 1931 as sure that he was indispensable as that he was right. His dramatic sense joyfully exaggerated the crisis: the flames must rise high that he might, vividly, soar above them. Anyone who took a calmer view of the emergency, anyone who disagreed with him, was, simply, a traitor. Into the minds of others he had never had any difficult inclination to enter.

So what hurt, and hurt poisonously, in August-September 1931, was the apparent lightness of heart and easy indifference with which he then broke with old associates. He took none of them into his full confidence, beforehand. No member of the Cabinet, not even Snowden, knew till he announced it that he proposed to form a coalition government. They went away from Downing Street on the Sunday night believing that he was going to hand in his and their common resignations. When he made the astonishing announcement next morning — as astonishing to Neville Chamberlain and Herbert Samuel as to Snowden, so it is recorded — only Snowden, Thomas, and Sankey were asked to stay behind when the others filed out, and invited to join a ‘National’ administration. When he later met his junior ministers, he merely told them that they would not be opposed in their constituencies; the new government was formed for a specific purpose, which it would not outlast. He did not ask any of them to join it. The party meeting he did not condescend to attend. The impression he conveyed was that he did not desire the adherence of any section of the Labor Party.

In the House of Commons, he at no time made any reference to those broken ties which caused Henderson to stumble in his speech and blanched his ruddy cheeks. On the contrary: with no sign of difficult transition, MacDonald abused the men he had worked with only a week earlier, and for thirty years before that; he treated his new associates — whom he had opposed throughout his entire active political life — as though he had always been of their company. The solemn pledge not to hold an election on the new parties alignment — a pledge given in public and in private and over the air, in the most definite and categoric terms — was broken within two months; and he then launched against Labor a campaign of abuse such as had not been met even in 1924. The shock caused by this conduct embittered and poisoned the minds of Labor members, as of the simple men and women, up and down the country, who had idealized MacDonald ever since 1914. Can we trust anybody again? they asked.

The sense of shock deepened when, after the election installed him as head of a National combination with an immense majority, pacifists saw him betray peace as Socialists had seen him betray Socialism. Eminent Conservatives had believed that they would have to pay a pacifist Premier a heavy price for his acceptance of their tariff policy, and that the terms of that price would be expressed in disarmament. They found there was no price to pay. In making Sir John Simon Foreign Secretary, MacDonald selected a man congenitally disqualified by the analytic and destructive brain of the visionless type of lawyer from dealing with the vast imponderables of the international situation. Personally responsible for that fatal choice, out of which the present Far Eastern tragedy directly arises, he is further responsible for the failure of the Disarmament Conference, where the British attitude blocked progress on every technical commission, and Britain supported France and the Little Entente in obstinate resistance to the grant of equality on a disarmament basis to Germany.

Between 1931 and 1935, MacDonald could have done much for peace; his epitaph, here, is the Rearmament White Paper of March 1935, the last official document initialed by him.

Here again, of course, one is confronted by the fatal gulf between generalities and their translation into action that balked his Internationalist as his Socialist professions of reality. He could, and he did, make marvelous speeches about peace and about international understanding; he had great gifts as a diplomat, whether as president of conference or as direct negotiator. But when it came to action he could not resist the impact and stifling pressure of the old ideas. His international functioning was, therefore, as conventional as was his private attitude to art or morals, or Socialism itself. He never ‘took to’ Geneva; from the collective system and the collective attitude he remained, fatally, aloof.

Moreover, the poison of jealousy played its part. Disarmament was suspect for him, because Henderson was president of the conference for which he had, as Foreign Secretary, paved the way. The shameful campaign against Henderson came from Downing Street, and was carried over to Geneva, where his isolation from the British delegation shocked all observers. Into this jealous weakness, as into snobbishness, the inner uncertainty that troubled his egotism betrayed MacDonald.

V

In 1928, I heard him deliver a great speech at the Albert Hall in London, which he closed by quoting the famous lines of Blake: —

I listened, amazed. ‘Till I have built’ — no, ‘till we have built.’ But my ears had not deceived me. He said ‘I,’ because he thought ‘I.’

The misquotation was profoundly illuminating. Always, he thought ‘I.’ He could do no other. That, in the last resort, was why he displayed, in his relations with his fellows, an unkindness and a lightness of mind that lacerated them, and made them doubt whether they had ever been entitled to call him friend. Their feelings, their ideas, their convictions, never carried for him any equal authority. They were never fully real to him. When broken-hearted old companions asked themselves if he had ever cared for any of them, or for any idea or person outside himself, the answer had to be that, in so far as caring is an emotion disinterested and unselfcentred, carrying with it a deep acceptance of the individuality of others, it was an emotion he did not know, outside the possessive circle of his immediate family. He spoke, beautifully, of friends who were dead; of the living, who can now rise up and say he gave him that genuine attachment which is an exchange of equal concern? He wanted the mass adoration that exalts the dictator; at many periods through his career he had it. But of true friendship he was incapable. His spirit moved in terms of isolated egotism, through a loneliness imposed by its own nature.