THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. No. DXLII. NEW SERIES, FEBRUARY 1, 1912. THE TURN OF THE TIDE. MR. BONAR LAW has achieved his new office under the fairest of political auspices. A party which last summer appeared to be in the depths of disintegration and despair, is now looking forward with confidence to a day not very far distant when it will assume the reins of Imperial Office. The event has, indeed, falsified the predictions of those palæolithic prophets who have declared for years unnumbered, with a reiteration which grew positively painful, that the retirement of Mr. Balfour spelt the end of any confidence which the country could feel in Conservatism. On the contrary, the party, now free from the well-intentioned and metaphysical blight which the ideas of Hatfield dispersed over the whole length and breadth of the United Kingdom, is showing a buoyancy and almost youthful determination which has long been foreign to its character as an Opposition. Unionism has at last given the view hallo at the sight of its predestined prey. It would be absurd to attribute such a phenomenon to any one fact. The collocation of circumstances which have produced this single result are compounded with many contributory itemsthe retirement of the ex-leader, the commanding powers exhibited by his successor, the sudden growth of anti-Ministerialist feeling, the dissensions in the Cabinet, old party promissory notes which must now at last be paid in full, and last, but not least, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's complete loss of nerve and selfcontrol. It is not easy to express the immense confidence and enthusiasm which Mr. Bonar Law's accession to power has generated in the minds of his followers. It has found the less open expression because those public men or publicists who supported one or other of the rival candidates for the office had not cared to express their appreciation of Mr. Law's inaugural moves lest they should VOL. XCI. N.S. P The be suspected of sycophancy or of turning to the rising sun. motive is an honourable one, if it has been liable to misconstruction. As a matter of fact, the whole party is to-day perfectly satisfied that Mr. Law, under the most difficult and delicate of conditions, has made no mistake and no single false move, either as regards the internal position of the party or in his relations to the Ministerial Front Bench. The speech at Leeds was admirable. That great annual meeting of all the Unionist associations of the country was, by the accident of events, thrust on the new leader before he had had a moment to turn round or to take any broad survey of the situation. Under the circumstances, it would have been pardonable if a man with the new leader's lack of official experience and distinguished oratorical powers had taken refuge either in a timid repetition of well-worn shibboleths, or in a flamboyant rhetoric designed to mark the opening of a new epoch. The new leader did neither. He was quiet, lucid, and extraordinarily determined without use of that offensive language which in women. denotes hysteria and in Mr. Lloyd George the feeling that things are going badly. He indicated to his audience and to the country that he was one of those men who are quietest when they really mean business. The truth of the matter is that his Majesty's Ministers have traded too long on Mr. Balfour's profound moderation and innate dislike to civil disturbance, whether that disturbance be in a gagged House of Commons or in a country deprived of its constitutional rights. They have come to believe that any outrage could be passed off under cover of the constitutional good humour of the leader of the Opposition. That happy epoch has come to an end. In Mr. Law Ministers have struck a man of a grim and invincible determination, the quietude of whose external demeanour is only a mask for the forces which exist within; the longer, however, that Ministers prefer to believe the contrary, the better for the fortunes of the Unionist party. It is, indeed, to his Majesty's Ministers that our greatest gratitude is due. The turn of the tide was bound to come anyway, but they have antedated that turn. In this their action has been dictated, partly by pure folly, and partly by the inexorable logic of events. The fact of the matter is that Lloyd Georgism is not Liberalism, and that the Chancellor is not a Liberal. Liberalism in our day has stood firmly for Disestablishment, waveringly for Home Rule, persistently for a reversal of the Education Act of 1902, and venomously for the punishment of peers and publicans alike. This is the policy for which Mr. Asquith stood and stands, and everyone knows it. It was this orthodox programme, this echo of disastrous Newcastle, that Ministers began to produce after 1906. The proceeding left the country cold. This was not the dénouement to which the country imagined the delirious transports of that election were to lead. Within eighteen months by-election after by-election began to indicate that the country was no more Liberal in Mr. Asquith's sense than it was in 1895. The writing was on the wall, and it is a bold man who will attempt to blot out Mene Tekel. At this point the Chancellor came to the rescue with a policy, which, whatever its merits or defects, had no connection whatever with the Liberalism of the Prime Minister or Mr. Gladstone. Probably neither side understood fully for what stakes they were playing on the Budget issue; neither believed that the other side really meant grim business. As a result, the Conservatives lost the Constitution (a heavy penalty enough, but not, as events are shaping, an irreparable one); while the Liberals lost a hundred seats, and, in reality, their own independence of every separate force which ever joined to make them a Ministry. Verily the whirligig of Limehouse has brought its revenges. That speech excluded Unionism from office at a time when it was utterly unfit to possess it, while it brought back on the Chancellor with one tremendous rebound the whole of the Newcastle programme. What have been the topics which have agitated Parliament and the country since the Lords, Newcastle; Home Rule, Newcastle; Disestablishment, Newcastle; the Chancellor has, indeed, striven heroically against Fate; knowing well that all these policies have long been relegated to the limbo of the prehistoric, he attempted in the cramped time left at his disposal to carry an Insurance Bill which should distract attention from the unpopularity of the older creeds of Liberalism. Let us review for a moment the Chancellor's gyrations since the last election. The moment that it became clear that the Parliament Bill would pass, it became certain that all post-obits on the Lords issued by Ministers would have to be met in full, and promptly. Mr. Redmond and the Welsh would wait no longer; Mr. Redmond was master of the situation, while since practically every Radical member in Wales was either a knight or a baronet, the resources of civilisation for postponing Welsh Disestablishment were pretty well exhausted. Indeed, if Welsh and Irish measures were to have any real chance of passing the postponing powers of the Lords before a dissolution, 1912 was the last session available. Mr. Lloyd George was, however, perfectly sure that there was no electioneering cash in Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment; on the contrary, they were likely to be profoundly unpopular. The Insurance Bill then was rushed to the front in the fragment still left of 1911, to be to those measures what Old Age Pensions and the Budget were to Free Trade and the Licensing Bill-the jam to cover the powder. The actual effects of the Insurance Bill on Ministerial popularity are an ironic comment on this ingenious plan ! Indeed, it is very difficult to understand how even a politician, possessed of the extraordinary slap-dash qualities of the Chancellor, could ever have expected even the best of contributory Bills to be instantaneously popular. The more reasonable belief is that, however much Ministers may have under-estimated the difficulties and dangers of their scheme, they never thought it would be a great popular success. What they did think was that the Tory opposition to it would be a tremendous and unpopular failure. It was not the detailed merits of the Bill which were to commend it, it was the Whitefield rhetoric about wicked Mr. Balfour and the rich who would baulk the People's Insurance. Indeed, both at Birmingham early, and at Whitefield's late, in the campaign, Mr. Lloyd George was obviously firing carefullytrained guns at an enemy which, unfortunately for him, had failed to keep the military appointment. The speeches as a result fell completely flat. The trap was tasteful in appearance and neatly set, but the rats had-engagements elsewhere. It is, indeed, perfectly clear that a blank opposition to the Bill might have led to its rapid passage through the Commons in a storm of popular indignation and a period of unpopularity for Toryism, while the details of the Bill were ill-understood and its application was still six or nine months' distant. Toryism, in a word, would have entered on the Home Rule struggle under a severe handicap in the great industrial centres. But Mr. Lloyd George omitted two factors from his calculations. In the first place, there is an adage, "once bit, twice shy." The Chancellor had shown in the time he allowed for the debates in the Commons on the Land Taxes of 1909, that he understood the well-known pugilistic trick of giving your opponent an obvious opening in order to deliver the knock-out blow. No "Insurance Protest League" was organised the day after the first reading. On the contrary, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Austen Chamberlain approached that first reading in a spirit of wise and prudent circumspection. In the second place, Ministers made no allowance for the great strides which the Tory-Democratic movement has made in the Tory ranks since 1903. That sentiment, always innate in Toryism, and vastly stimulated by the economic conceptions underlying Tariff Reform, has gained a strong hold on the minds of the Unionist representatives of the great urban centres; nor does its influence stop there. It so happened that the feeling had found definite expression in a group committee under the chairmanship of Mr. F. E. Smith at the very moment that the Insurance Bill was introduced. The members of that committee were far from regarding the principle of the Bill with disapproval. On the contrary, they considered that a scheme of contributory insurance was the right way to deal with the question. And since those who know their subject will always exercise a strong influence over the minds of those who do not, the views of the social reformers in the party became the deciding factor in the Unionist attitude towards the Bill. The Opposition decided to approve the principle of the Bill without committing itself to its details. By this providential means a very serious risk was averted from Unionism, and a most damaging blow inflicted on Ministerial prospects, for it was in the detail that the whole weakness of the Bill consisted. The Chancellor, however, was not done yet. It was impossible after the first and second readings to denounce the Tories as opposed to the insurance of the people in principle; but was it not possible to make them equally responsible with Ministers for any electoral trouble the details of the scheme might cause? Overtures in this sense were therefore made, and might, indeed, have been accepted, willingly or unwillingly, by the Opposition chiefs but for two considerations-time and the Chancellor's method of handling the House of Commons and the vested interests. The Unionist party could not possibly have agreed to seeing a Bill for which they were jointly responsible passed under the conditions of time and discussion which Ministers proposed. Yet the Ministerial time-table was absolutely inelastic for one simple reason. They could not prolong the discussion of the Bill into the present year because to do so would have jeopardised the prospects of Home Rule, and this Mr. Redmond would not permit. Newcastle was again too much for the Chancellor. In the second place, the Opposition leaders did not approve of the new Ministerial practice of settling vital points in the Bill by a system of private conferences with vested interests, the results of which conferences were then thrust upon the House of Commons by the mechanical use of the majority. They could not co-operate usefully without attending these conciliabulionesbut to have done so would have been to substitute secret government by the two Front Benches and some private individuals for government by discussion and the House of Commons. In this way failed Mr. Lloyd George's alternative scheme for inveigling |