The Proud Tower (65 page)

They were not a coherent group and never had been. Their dominant philosophy, as of liberalism anywhere, favored change and reform, but it was cut into by a thousand fissures of ideas and social background. In person the Liberals ranged from Whig aristocrats like Lord Rosebery to country gentlemen like Sir Edward Grey to men of business wealth like Campbell-Bannerman to landless intellectuals like Asquith and Morley to a unique and alien upstart from the Celtic fringe like Lloyd George. Some were Little Englanders who regarded Empire, in the words of John Bright, as “a gigantic system for providing outdoor relief for the aristocracy”; some were as fervent imperialists as the Tories. Some were Church of England, some Nonconformist, some Home Rulers, some unalterably opposed to Home Rule. Some were ardent Radicals dedicated to redistribution of wealth and political power, some were magnates of industry absorbed in making fortunes. Those who were Liberals from conviction rather than from family tradition or political expedient felt that between themselves and the Tories existed “a gulf as wide as any in previous time”; the gulf, as Herbert Samuel put it, between “the quietist and the reformer.” Filled with the zeal of the reformer, Samuel believed that the principles of Liberalism “are nothing else than the application to public affairs of the religious spirit itself.” Some Liberals were sincere, some were opportunists, some were demagogues, some like Lloyd George all three at once. They were the outs, eager for office, ready to answer the demands of a new time.

Their opponents were split among themselves, harassed by a series of domestic quarrels which had reopened since the Boer War with a peculiar vehemence. All the hatred and jealousy of Nonconformity for the Establishment blew up into a national tempest over the Education Act of 1902. Sponsored and largely drafted by Balfour himself, the Act added secondary to primary education as an obligation of the state with the object of making it available to all and of bringing all schools up to a uniform standard. Like the Compulsory Education Act of 1870 it had an economic motive: the recognition that unless the nation undertook to raise the level of schooling, it would continue to fall behind in the competition for markets. In effecting progress, the Act was perhaps the most important of the decade but its method was partisan. By favoring and, in fact, giving financial support to the schools of the Established Church—that is, the Church of England—while the Board Schools under local control were abolished, the Act infuriated the Nonconformists, who were traditionally Liberals. It supplied a cause to reunite the Imperialist and Radical wings of the Liberal party which had divided over the Boer War and Home Rule. Debate in the Commons took on the animus peculiar to the war of High Church against Low Church, Methodist clergymen wrote outraged letters to the papers, the Act was called “the greatest betrayal since the Crucifixion,” protest meetings assembled in villages and leagues were formed pledged to non-payment of school taxes with all the fervor of Roundheads refusing ship money to King Charles. Lloyd George, already the champion of Welsh Disestablishment, encouraged the leagues with histrionic oratory. In throwing themselves into a revival of religious battle, people seemed to be on the hunt for excitement, as if the Boer War had created a taste for it while supplying its physical experience to less than two per cent of the population.

The cry “Votes for Women!” promised further trouble and those who raised it frankly called themselves “militants.” They organized under the leadership of Mrs. Pankhurst in 1903 in opposition to the Suffrage group led by Mrs. Fawcett which believed in obtaining the vote by persuasion. Their first experiments in militancy, confined to heckling and unfurling banners at political meetings, while not yet serious, were one more evidence, as Lady Frances Balfour wrote, of “new winds blowing hard through society.”

At the same time, mine-owners of the Rand were demanding license to import Chinese labour when African labour, finding enough work after the war to satisfy a low appetite, could not be obtained for the mines. Contract labour had horrid connotations from which the Government shrank, but the mine-owners were insistent, else they could not reopen, investments were tied up, Rand shares tumbled, and as the
Economist
frankly stated, it was a matter of £.
s.d.
“If the people of England and elsewhere who own Transvaal mining shares to the value of £200,000,000 want to get their money back with interest, then they will have to tackle this labour question in the right spirit.”

The Government reluctantly consented, the Chinese were brought in and lodged in compounds; the Liberals, who had themselves introduced contract labour in British Guiana, now thundered in awful wrath. The Chinese compounds were no worse than England’s dark satanic slums, where one water faucet and one privy often served twenty-five families, where beds were rented for three and the space under them for two. But humanitarian instincts grow fiercer in proportion to the distance by which their causes are removed and it is always easier to build Jerusalem in Africa than at home. Moreover the Chinese labour issue carried the smell of money which had hung about the Boer War from the start. It devalued the moral content which the imperialists liked to attach to the cause of Empire.

On top of these issues Joseph Chamberlain wrought havoc with Tariff Reform. When he launched his campaign for Protection he aroused against his party the fundamental British sentiment of laissez-faire, raised among the people old memories of hated Corn Laws and fears of a rise in food prices, handed the Liberals another issue in the cry “Free food!” and split his party between the old and the new Conservatives, between land and money. Manufacturers and businessmen, exponents of what H. G. Wells called “commercialized imperialism with all its push and energy,” favored Protection. As an imperialist and businessman himself, Chamberlain saw it as a means of drawing together the mother country and all its dependencies in a vast Imperial tariff system which would stimulate trade within the Empire and prosperity at home, strengthen Imperial bonds, increase revenues for social legislation, and, not least, provide an issue of which he would be the hero. In the British Cabinet he was what Germany was among the nations: dynamic, ambitious, conscious of power and ability, fitted in his own mind for the top place and galled that it was held by another. Tariff Reform was his usurpation of the office he had missed. It wrecked the Cabinet. Chamberlain himself resigned, the better to carry his campaign to the country. Five Free Traders, including the Duke of Devonshire and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also resigned. In the ranks a vigorous new M.P., Winston Churchill, waving the banner of Free Trade, crossed over to join the Liberals amid cries of “Rat!” from the Tories. Interminable debates raged over preferential duties, bounties, dumping, and other fiscal mysteries. The public, barely comprehending, took sides, Free Food leagues sprang up alongside the anti-school-tax leagues; the British people were rapidly becoming as contentious as the French.

As Prime Minister, Mr. Balfour, still suave, effortless, unaddicted to political dogma, refused to take a firm position, partly because he saw no firm ground on which to take one and partly because he believed a strategy of steering between extremes was the best way to hold his party together and his Government in office. He saw no virtue in a doctrinaire persistence in Free Trade and he could see advantages to British industry in some form of selective tariff, although he had no wish to swallow Chamberlain’s program whole. The one thing he firmly believed was that continued direction of England’s affairs by the Conservative party was more important than either Free Trade or Protection and this he was determined to maintain. Amid quarreling colleagues, resigning ministers, party apostasies, he eluded all pressures and coolly told the House that he would be ill performing his duty “if I were to profess a settled conviction where no settled conviction exists.” He infused the issues with such philosophic doubt and infused his doubt with such authority as almost to mesmerize members on both sides. When called upon to explain his relations with Free Traders and Protectionists within his own party he “indulged the House with a brilliant display of disdainful banter.” Exploiting all his parliamentary dexterity, he maneuvered the Government through session after session for more than two years, seeming almost to find amusement in the difficulty of his task. But the performance left his followers uneasy. They wanted the leader of their party to lead and instead, as Harry Cust said, “he nailed his colors to the fence.”

Balfour’s purpose, however, was serious. He wanted to retain office as long as he could in order to consolidate the Entente and the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence especially after the Tangier Crisis of 1905. He had given the order for rearming the artillery with a new quick-firing gun, the 18-pounder, and he was determined, as he explained later, “not to go out of office until we were so far committed to the expenditure that no Liberal Government could have withdrawn from that position.” Relentless, Chamberlain persisted in his campaign. Balfour’s dancing on eggs grew increasing difficult as the exasperation of his own party and the impatience for office of the Opposition mounted.

Overshadowing all was the Social Problem. Investigations and reports appearing all at once after 1900 made harshly visible the fact and the consequences of extreme inequality in possession of material goods. In B. S. Rowntree’s
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
, 1901, in the last volume of Charles Booth’s
Life and Labour of the People of London
, 1903, in L. Chiozza Money’s
Riches and Poverty
, 1905, in reports of the Royal Commission on Labour and in the Fabian Society’s studies of the destitute, diseased and insane, evidence accumulated that the richest country in the world rested on a foundation of one-third of its population living “in chronic poverty, unable to satisfy the primal needs of animal life.” Chiozza Money showed that economic inequality was particularly wide in England. In France, whose population was about the same, there were twice as many small estates between £.500 and £ 10,000 as in England, but in the United Kingdom three times as many large estates over £50,000 and four times as many over £250,000 as in France.

The investigators produced the facts: sleep, diet, sanitation, privacy, even respiratory air, were inadequate for basic human needs. Professor Huxley had calculated that 800 cubic feet of air space per person was the ideal. Even the Poor House provided 300. In the slums people lived three to a bedroom of 700 cubic feet or, with children, eight and nine in a space of 1,200 cubic feet. Vermin lived with them, a piece of paper on the floor served as a toilet, fish on Sundays was the weekly protein for a family of eight, at two and a half ounces per portion. Children were stunted and pale, with rotting teeth, and if they went to school, sat dully at their desks or fell asleep. Ignorance and apathy as much as ill health were poverty’s product; the slums were sloughs of wasted lives. Overcrowding in country villages was often as bad. In an Oxfordshire cottage a family of eight slept in two beds with a pair of thin blankets among them, in a Yorkshire cottage husband and wife and five daughters shared two beds and an attic floor, in Somerset a mother and three children slept in one room, five children of both sexes up to the age of nineteen in another.

For unskilled and unorganized labour, working conditions matched the slums. At the Shawfield Chemical Works in Glasgow in 1897, year of the Diamond Jubilee, workmen received 3
d
. or 4
d.
an hour for a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, spent amid poisonous vapors without a lunch-hour rest. They ate lunch standing at the furnaces and if they took Sunday off were fined the next day’s wages. Lord Overtoun, owner of the Works, a philanthropist who gave £10,000 a year to charity, was a leading member of the Sunday Observance and Sunday Rest Societies. In other industries workers could be arrested for taking a day off without permission. If they applied for it, the request could be refused; if they took it anyway they could be, and often were, hauled off to a day in gaol. Skilled workers organized in England’s craft unions, the oldest in Europe, were better off. Numbering about one-fifth of all adult male workers, a larger proportion than in any other country, they had their own insurance and pension systems backed by large funds and they benefited from lower prices in their own cooperatives. Nevertheless, vis-à-vis capital, they were still on the defensive and the dark persistent presence of unemployment at their backs made them vulnerable.

England’s economy since 1900 had recovered from the depression of the nineties and was on the whole prosperous, active and expanding. Shippers and shipbuilders, bankers and millowners were busy, coal mines were operating to capacity, and although in chemical, electrical and other new industries the British were not as enterprising as some foreign competitors, most businesses, despite ups and downs, were doing well. Yet the gap in distribution of profits was growing not less but greater. While the rich lived at an acme of luxury and leisure, the purchasing power of wages was falling and human material deteriorating. The minimum height for recruits for the British Army was lowered from five feet three inches in 1883 to five feet in 1900.

Something was wrong with the system. Somehow the great mechanical and material achievements of the recent past had twisted society out of shape. In the United States, where the process was accelerated, Thorstein Veblen was moved to make his inquiries into business enterprise and the Muckrakers to their searches in the slums and stockyards and the files of Standard Oil. In England, reformers, writers, crusading journalists, Fabians, Socialists, Radical Liberals were impatient for the remedy. The shrill cries of H. G. Wells warned that material progress without planning would lead to a future, as he depicted it in
When the Sleeper Wakes
in 1899, of higher buildings, bigger towns, wickeder capitalists, more downtrodden and desperate labour, a future where “everything was bigger, quicker, more crowded” … in short an “exaggeration of contemporary tendencies.” Like a blue jay incessantly pecking and cawing at the ills of civilization, he demanded in
Anticipations
in 1900 and
A Modern Utopia
in 1905 the New Republic of a planned society and fervently expounded the possibilities for improvement which science had put in the hands of man.