{143}
The whole of this book so far has consisted in a criticism of the Party System. It is well for the sake of right judgment to consider at the close what may be (and is privately) said in its favour by those who make their living off it. What excuses do they offer? First this:—
States, as all the world knows, and as those who know the world least are never tired of informing us, are organic things, not mechanical. You cannot make a State: it has to grow.
The English State at the present moment, or, to speak more accurately, the British State (excluding of course Ireland, the new countries, and the dependencies) has enjoyed a peculiarly unbroken continuity of institutions. Not a peculiarly unbroken continuity compared with many States in history; but, during the last 150 years at least, a peculiarly unbroken one, compared with the great States of Europe, its rivals.
Among the other institutions of Britain which {144} have been developed during this comparatively long period of unbroken continuity stands the Party System. Under its machinery, acting according to its rules, England, until she began to experience her recent embroilments and anxieties, prospered. She was, until recently, the wealthiest nation in the world; and in the full military sense of military strength, wherein defence is a main part of the problem, she was almost the strongest. Men of high capacity have continually succeeded one another as a product of the Party System, and in general, being an institution in a State whose institutions have been so continuous, it should remain.
This is the first and most plausible excuse which its beneficiaries make in favour of the Party System. There is attached to it a converse excuse of almost equal effect which stands thus:—
In a State of ancient institutions—indeed, in any State—you must not lightly destroy an institution, for when you have destroyed it you cannot with ease replace it by another institution. The political institutions of men are not theories, they are things. Destroy the monarchy, for instance, of a despotic society, and you are bound to supply the gap which it has left by some other definite and powerful organ of government, concrete because it is human, and because it is human necessarily subject to error and to vice. “Leave well alone ”should therefore be a standing motto, so far as primary institutions are concerned, with {145} every patriotic man. Unless you have some clear alternative capable of concrete expression, and certainly capable of giving as good a result as the institution you propose to overthrow, then an attack upon it is anarchic and profoundly unwise.
But apart from these two, which are the main excuses offered by the professional politicians in favour of the Party System to-day, its apologists can draw up an abstract series of arguments in its favour.
The Party System, properly worked, reposes essentially upon this doctrine: that to every question there must be a positive and a negative answer: with every policy suggested by a statesman we must roughly and in the main acquiesce, or we must roughly and in the main dissent from it. An all-powerful Executive, or even an Executive which submits to the check that can be given by representative bodies or by other organs in the State, affords no opportunity for the discussion, and the balance for and against, of any policy. The Party System is therefore better than an unchecked or but partially checked Executive; and indeed it was its superiority over such forms of Executive which was the boast of Englishmen over the Continent a hundred years ago.
On the other hand (would say both the beneficed defender of the Party System and the Don who is happily ignorant of intrigue), actual government by a deliberative body, or even the granting of a supreme power of veto and check to a deliberative body, is in {146} practice impossible. A deliberative body, in proportion to its excellence in its deliberative character, is incapable of initiative and of directly expressed will. The best thing we can do for the State, therefore, is to preserve a system under which, while one body of men shall be tempted, in order to preserve and obtain large salaries and power, to put forward a policy which they believe to be agreeable to the commonwealth, and which at the same time they know is so debatable as to require open discussion, another body, commanding followers fairly equal in numbers, shall be present as advocates upon the other side to help decide the issue.
In many policies the nation will be so much at one that the play of the two parties will not be called upon; as, for instance, in the determination to grant Old Age Pensions in 1907. In other cases details only, not general policies, are at stake, and for this the kind of debate known in the House of Commons as the “Committee stage” of a Bill amply provides. But for the very largest issues in national policy nothing can work for more open or more thorough discussion, and for a more proper appreciation of the national mind, than the presence in numbers, not too unequal, of two sets of debaters, sent by the electorate to Westminster for the purpose of discussing some great subject which has been put forward as a policy by one or the other of the leading teams. Such a debate we are having (the apologists for {147} the Party System would say) upon the great and important national question of Protection versus Free Trade. And the reiterated arguments, examples, rhetorical appeals (the whole criticism and flux to which the policy of Free Trade and its opposite are subjected by the Party System) proves the superiority of that system to any other method of government.
Again, the Party System provides (it has often been pointed out) an alternative government. The alternative government is potentially there; no violence, no breach with the past is necessary to establish under our happy institutions even the greatest change in the conduct of the nation. Had a party system been working, for instance, in France when one set of French politicians decided upon religious schism, the electorate would have been consulted upon that issue; and when they had decided in favour of schism or against it, a body of men trained in government and willing to express the views of the majority of the electors—or rather of their deputies—would have been ready instantly to take the place of the other body whose policy had lost the confidence of the nation.
Many other minor arguments may be advanced—by such as are interested in it—to defend the Party System.
It may be urged, for instance, that in England—whatever is the case with other countries—a faint line of cleavage really dividing the nation into two (but providentially not so deep as to {148} wound its unity) is to be discovered. There is your English Liberal type, and your English Conservative type, your Chapel man and your Church man, and to this line of cleavage which is a reality, the reality of the Party System corresponds.
Yet another minor argument resides in this: that with the Party System you can get an organisation and equipment of the electorate which you could never get without such a discipline. Thus we may compare the percentage of voters in contested elections in.England with the percentage that come to the poll abroad, and the advantage in our favour may be laid to the door of the Party System.
Finally—and this, as it is the least rational and the most ignorant, is with politicians the most powerful argument of all—the Party System works not only well, but better than any corresponding system among our great rivals. The position we hold among the nations, the happiness and the content of our masses, our power of immediate and irresistible offence in the vindication of our national rights or desires, our sober, successful, and profound social reforms which are the admiration of the universe, have been the product of the Party System; and even if something theoretically better, nay, something demonstrably better in the concrete, could be presented to us, we should be foolish indeed to abandon that which has made of this country everything that the citizens of any country can possibly desire.
{149} Now, against these excuses it is fortunately not difficult to open batteries which leave them in ruins.
If we take the various points mentioned—and they fairly cover the ground of those who still apologise for our moribund parliamentary methods—they can be riddled one after the other with an ease that makes one almost ashamed to undertake the task. Let us proceed, as is only fair in such cases, from the weakest to the strongest, and consider the arguments just stated in the opposite order to that wherein we have laid them down.
The last argument, which certainly has had until lately the greatest force and which is still not without its power in what are called “the residential suburbs” of our great towns; the argument which in itself was worth, until recently, more than all the others put together, is to-day based, where it exists, upon those two characters which, in any society, are most directly and immediately ruinous of its prosperity: ignorance and vanity. Nothing but an appalling ignorance can make those who live under the Party System today believe that the State has to-day the strength it used to have for offence against foreign enemies; that it holds the economic position it held a generation ago; that the condition of our enormous population of very poor is regarded with anything but pity and horror by the more contented peoples of continental Europe; that our hasty and incomplete social reforms, our method of raising and our {150} present necessities for spending the public revenue, are models for other nations. Even if ignorance permitted a man to hold such fantastic opinions, nothing but vanity could permit him to hold them untroubled. Though a man should never have travelled a mile out of his own country, nor be acquainted with a single foreign language, nor (what is perhaps more important) be capable of one sound judgment upon any foreign thing he saw or any foreign word he read, yet short of a most disastrous and diseased vanity he must know that a complete satisfaction with such a society as he sees round him in the great cities that are the typical polities of Britain, is below the normal standard of human political achievement.
Though he have no history, and be unable to compare the modern wretchedness with the happiness of the past, yet mere instinct and the common conscience of man must, unless he is positively blinded by vanity, teach him that something is very ill with England to-day.
True, it would be inept to lay at the door of one such institution as the Party System the enormous evils from which Britain increasingly suffers, and their increase at a rate which seriously menaces her future. But that is not the point. The point is that to argue from the excellence of conditions in England to-day to the excellence of the Party System is to argue from a falsehood to a nonsensical result. The social and political conditions in England to-day are not good, but bad: they are {151} bad compared with our own remote past, bad compared with those of our great rivals, and bad compared with that standard of tolerable conditions which all men carry in them and which is something very different from and much lower than any ideal of a perfect society.
As for the pretension that the parties do correspond to a real though not a deep division between two kinds of English thought, it deserves more careful examination.
In the origin of the Party System that system corresponded to a very real and a very deep division. The system itself was run by an aristocracy and run more or less corruptly—very corruptly as far as individual statesmen were concerned. But these individual statesmen were the spokesmen of two great bodies of really divided opinion: the one inherited from Jacobite loyalty, the other from the Whig revolution. Doctor Johnson was not a dupe, he was not an ignorant man, above all he was not a fraud. He was a man very learned, one acquainted with all kinds of his fellows, intensely national and gloriously sincere: and Doctor Johnson did hate a Whig. Two very distinct philosophies once animated the two parties, and the distinction between these philosophies retained some vigour till the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The echoes of those opposed political philosophies have been heard by many men now living. Indeed, it is possible to forgive an elderly man, sincere, {152} informed, and courageous, who still attaches some sort of meaning to the supposed differences between the party leaders. He may have a knowledge that in our moment their play is a pure humbug, but he can remember a generation in which some sort of ideal contest, or at any rate the savour of it, still remained.
But if we are talking of conditions as they exist here and now, then we must admit, in proportion to our information of what the political world is and of how its sham battles are as a matter of fact fought to-day, that not the memory, not the savour of a real distinction remains.
There are still a number of Tory squires in the countrysides, but the party which they reluctantly support does not pretend to represent them.
There are still a number of honest and elderly middle class Liberals lingering in the suburbs of our great towns, but the party for which they vote (those of them who do not call themselves “Liberal Unionists”) is not fighting their battles.
As for the mass of the people whom once these divisions also affected in some degree, they affect it now no longer. There is no division, not even the adumbration of a division, there is no line, not even the vaguest dotted line, which marks off, in psychology, manners, inherited tradition, or practice of daily life, a wage-earner who votes for Jones from a wage-earner who votes for Smith. The distinction imposed by official candidates is for the mass of workers absolutely unreal; and the {153} individuals in the mass of workers by an overwhelming majority would, if they were asked, say so in so many words. They vote thus and thus apathetically, with no hope that any result will come to them from their vote, and they vote with no feeling of intimate sympathy between the philosophy of the candidate they support and their own philosophy; and that for a very good reason: the candidate whom they may support, whether he stands pledged to obey the one set of leaders or the other, is defending no philosophy at all. The argument from a supposed real division of the people upon the lines of the parties simply will not hold water.
Nor will the next arguments in the series hold water. It is not true that the Party System provides an alternative Government ready to take the helm at a moment’s notice after a great change. Of all systems in modern Europe it provides such a Government least.
Let a violent Catholic reaction take place in France; let a strong Particularist movement appear in Italy; let self-government be granted to Ireland,—and to take over the management of wholly changed conditions capable men could immediately be found. But the Party System in this country depends upon the very conception that there cannot be any vital or considerable change. All the working of the party men and all their system of living upon the taxes is bound up with the necessity that the point of policy chosen {154} to divide them shall never be a vital one; and that in their method of daily life, the very set of drawing-rooms they frequent, there shall be no differences between Hanky and Panky whatsoever. A sudden change requiring an alternative Government is something which the Party System has taught the public to regard as wholly out of nature. Its appearance in a foreign country, however fruitful, is put by our party politicians before our populace as something alien and comic; and such men as really do desire a change, in religion (as some we could name), in economic arrangement (as the Socialists), in national arrangement (as the Irish), are treated by the Party System and its supporters with a violence of vituperation, a swift, determined and calculating offensive which give the lie to all the foolish and hypocritical talk about the deliberation and sobriety of our public life.
The same objection applies to the claim that the Party System permits of free and full debate upon the main issues before a nation: it does nothing of the kind. It permits of full and free debate only upon such subjects as the two allied teams called “the Government” and “the Opposition” have decided to have debated. Now and then, indeed, an intriguer of prominence, for some purpose of his own, breaks the rules of the game. He occupies perhaps a position high enough to be able to do so with advantage. This was the case when Mr Gladstone launched Home Rule without consulting the greater part of his colleagues, let {155} alone his nominal opponents: it was the case, again, when Mr Joseph Chamberlain launched Protection.
But even these real issues, once launched, are seized upon by the Party System and turned, by a process of digestion, as it were, into unreal issues in the shortest possible time. When once it was appreciated that the House of Lords would not pass Home Rule, the arguments for and against that policy were debated with all the professional rant of the play-actors upon our dull parliamentary stage. There was no conviction in their accents, and for the most of them no definite desire to arrive at a result, save the putting into office—that is, the giving of power and wealth to one of the two teams.
If anyone doubt this, let him discover the attitude of the Irish in Ireland upon the question. He will find that the so-called “Unionist” Party is regarded in precisely the same light as its pretended opponents. Every Irishman you will ever meet discussing the advantages his country has obtained during the last thirty years will talk with a complete impartiality of this Act, that policy, this personality, that blunder; sometimes oblivious of and always indifferent to the supposed party divisions at Westminster. So false is it that the Party System affords opportunity for full and reasoned debate upon great national issues, that not one great national issue since the repeal of the Corn Laws has obtained this supposed ad-{156}vantage. Not one piece of policy, however necessary, but, if it has become law, has become law by an agreement between the two sets of actors in the game. Where they have really disagreed the result has always been stalemate, and that for the very sufficient reason that a real and permanent victory upon either side would be the death of the system by which both sets of politicians obtain their bread-and-butter.
Finally, what are we to say with regard to the argument that the Party System, being an institution of this continuous and highly institutional country, should not lightly be tampered with?
As was said at the beginning of this chapter, that argument is a very powerful argument indeed. It appeals at once to the heart and to the head of every man who knows what a State is, and of every man who has any reverence for the past. There are innumerable examples to which this argument applies in modern England with more or less force. It is a strong plea for most of our ancient corporations; certainly for nearly all our ancient, and upon the whole innocuous, customs. It is a plea even for the maintenance of many definite and corporate institutions, ill-suited perhaps to the modern State, but possessing advantages of their own which, after reform, could never be supplied; but it is not an argument for the Party System, because the Party System, as an institution, has lost both the externals that bound {157} it to the life of the State, and the internal vitality which gave it a real meaning.
The Party System is now neither a quaint and an innocuous reminder of the past, nor a corporate and living thing still possessed of its identity and forming an integral part of the State.
It is not a mere symbol of our continuity, as are the wigs of our judges, or the curious little jockey cap which some official (whose name escapes us) carries at a high salary upon his head when the King’s assent to Bills is given in the House of Lords, [Note 157.1] or the archaic English and unnatural accent of the various rituals affected by ministers of religion.
Nor does it, to turn from relics to living institutions, correspond to what the Inns of Court are in the organisation of our legal system, or the collegiate arrangement of Oxford and Cambridge in the organisation of our University life.
The Party System, in other words, in so far as it is an institution, is an institution in the last stages of decay, but one which, since it affects the greatest interests of the nation, is not innocuous; moreover, as it has long lost any true identity with its past, it is no longer really alive. The necessity of being rid of it is like the necessity one is under of being rid of a great dead body in one’s neighbourhood when it has begun to putrefy. The decay of party has already begun to disturb the national life, and if we are not careful it may {158} poison it—so far has its corruption proceeded—and yet so obstinately do certain interests—mainly of a private nature and generally connected with salaries—persist in retarding its natural end.
We have indeed no need to concern ourselves further with the excuses offered for a continuance of the machine. Nothing remains in practical politics but for the practical politician to destroy the Party System as rapidly and as thoroughly as may be.
There is no need of finding an alternative. The alternative is there, underlying the evil. A free parliament, the ancient theory of a national deliberative assembly, is ready to hand when the encumbrance is got rid of. We do not need to frame some scheme which shall supplant the Party System: all we have to do is to make the Party System impossible; and that end will be accomplished when a sufficient number of men are instructed in its hypocrisies and follies, when the real and modern peril which it involves has been brought home to a sufficient number, and when men begin to ask for an opportunity to express their opinions at the polls. Light on the nasty thing and an exposure of it are all that is necessary. It stinks only because it has been so carefully masked and covered and its natural dissolution, thereby checked.
It is with the object of exposing it that this {159} book, which happily is but one of many vigorous contemporary efforts in the same direction, has been written.
One real obstacle does, however, remain to reform, and that is the strength of the only real support upon which the professional politicians and their now exhausted method can rely; and that real support is the attitude of the “Plain Man”—mainly of the lower middle classes—who, particularly in the suburbs of our great towns, is used by those professionals partly as a dupe and partly as an ally. Let us examine this person.
Into all attempt at reform there enters an element which is the converse of mere criticism or of mere exposure, and which forms a necessary basis for any constructive work. That element is the element of popular need.
Unless the mass of the nation needs a reform, not only is there no necessity for the undertaking of a considerable change, but there is great difficulty in accomplishing it; and it is and has been the continual error of abortive schemes that they corresponded only to some need suggested by historical parallels or present in a contemporary few, but not felt by the general body of citizens. It is not true, so far as political arrangements at least are concerned, that the desires or the necessities of a small minority immediately or even gradu-{160}ally impose themselves upon the State. Opinion may indeed be gradually so imposed by persuasion, and a new philosophy propagated; but until the new idea is accepted, acts cannot follow, and political change is invariably accompanied by a general and wide-spread ill-ease, which ill-ease is the expression of a popular need.
That a need for change is felt in modern England with regard to the machinery by which a small number of co-opted men combine to govern the country in collusion is certain. But there is a body in which that need is not felt, and to which it does not apply. This body, which we have called “the Real Support” of the Party System, must now be examined.
We have seen in the preceding pages what excuses might be presented for the Party System of government by those several types of people who are directly interested in its continuance; and we have tried to appreciate the measure of sincerity which each such appeal would contain. Is there not perhaps a large and popular apology for the same thing, an apology that would proceed not from those interested in the maintenance of the system, but from those whom it governs, and (as the reformer would say) exploits?
Let us take a certain type of British elector, perhaps a business man or a shopkeeper or even an artizan, who, though by no means wholly duped by the Party System, yet lends it his support; and let us ask ourselves whether many such {161} would not reply to the demand for reform somewhat as follows (how many would so reply we must discuss later):—
“You have been careful to explain to me that a little group of men belonging to a class whose only common mark is wealth, reserve to themselves enormous salaries paid out of my pocket, and monopolise all the political power in the State, by the playing of an elaborate game. Their professions do not correspond with the true motives of the players, and the rules of this game do not concern the well-being of the body politic, but rather the maintenance of an even balance between two picked and chosen teams, which even balance is necessary to the proper conduct of any pastime, whether lucrative or merely entertaining.
“Well, I knew that already. I did not perhaps know all the details you have put before me, but in general I was acquainted with the nature of the business. It is not a fraud practised upon me; it is rather an admitted fiction necessary to the play of our institutions, and a fiction which I readily use.
“I do this for a number of reasons. I have a long tradition of it behind me; the accidents of the game afford me the best opportunity for a practical redress of grievances; it furnishes me with a mild excitement which is none the worse for being largely make-believe, and there is about it just as much reality as I feel inclined to put into my view of public life.
{162} “For instance, I am quite anxiously in favour of the taxation of land values in towns, and would willingly sacrifice a week’s holiday or pay a day’s wages to see that reform put into practice; and you cannot deny that that half of the clique which calls itself ‘Liberal’ is at the present moment trying to put such a reform into practice, while the other half, their brothers, uncles, cousins, intimate friends, etc., who call themselves ‘Unionists,’ are on the whole resisting the reform.
“I feel about my politics what I feel about my religion: the necessity for clothing a few moderate and vague tendencies in strong and exaggerated language, and in a heavy and stiff ceremonial which I know does not correspond to any internal strictness of definition, but which affords me something concrete upon which I can repose.
“When I go to a public meeting and hear Lord Algernon Crape denouncing Mr Charles Anser for an assassin and a traitor, I know as well as you do that Lord Algernon Crape married last year Mr Charles Anser’s sister, and that the two young men are really intimate friends. But I like that kind of thing in the ceremonial of my political religion. I am an Englishman; I like to see a prize-fight much more than to see a fight with lethal weapons; I like to read in books that I am a bold rider, that I love the sea, and that I indulge in fisticuffs—though of course I know very well that I can’t ride, that the sea knocks me out, that I do not use my fists in quarrels, and that if I had to it would be {163} extremely distasteful to me: it is fiction, but the fiction is good for me. Every nation and every society of men has its ritual and its convention, and ritual and convention of their nature involve make-believe.
“Then again, you are concerned to tell me that this clique of people are very rich, and, where large sums of money are concerned, very corrupt. You have pointed this out to me in rather more detail than I am accustomed to; but it is with this point as with the rest. I knew all about it before you were kind enough to explain it to me. I happen to like that kind of thing. What revolts me in the conduct of a State is not theft on a large scale by the few rich officials, but the acceptation of bribes on a small scale by the many poor officials. I feel instinctively that the second evil is much more practically dangerous to the State than the first.
“Mr Pompous, you tell me, made a new office with a salary of about £40 a week attached to it, stuck his mistress’s nephew into it, and gave that nephew’s brother a fantastic fee out of the taxes for some arbitration work in the Far East. You tell me that Mr Pompous was only able to pull off the double job by letting the money-lender, Mr Judaeus, suck dry the resources of such and such an Oriental district over which Mr Pompous’ colleague and first cousin was the master through his position in the Cabinet; but, my dear sir, had I been in old Pompous’ place, I should have {164} acted in precisely that same fashion. In my own sphere I act in that fashion every day. I rather respect Pompous for having managed to hold his tongue and to control his face so well for so many years as to have arrived at a position where he can cheat on a really large scale. Meanwhile, I see that the system gives me the services of Pompous’ brother-in-law for nothing. This chap inherited a couple of millions; what he wants is power and notoriety. He will never take a bribe, and he will give the State all the advantage of his ample leisure and vast opportunities.
“Best of all, with such a system Pompous and his gang will be absolutely merciless in punishing any corruption apparent in minor officials, and it is that kind of corruption, multiform, universal, and soon ineradicable, which poisons a State.
“Finally, I have noticed running through your criticism for reform one main note, which is that the Party System, apart from its falsehood and financial corruption, is especially to be condemned because it prevents any true representation of the popular will.
“Now, my dear sir, I have no sort of desire for the ‘Representation of the Popular Will.’ Phrases like that give me a headache. A machinery exists, an institution and traditions, which furnish me with a competent and regularly renewed set of men who look after the public weal. My forefathers have not, since the Middle Ages, concerned themselves with such abstractions as ‘the {165} popular will,’ and though I often use the word ‘represent’ and the substantive ‘representation,’ I don’t care a row of pins about either. I know very well that a violent and universal national feeling would be respected by the Party System, and it is only violent and universal feelings of the sort that the people as a whole need be concerned about.
“I might end by telling you this: I like to be governed by rich men. It makes me feel cosy. Perhaps that is because it rids me of any sense of responsibility and puts me vaguely into touch with luxuries I cannot enjoy. Anyhow, I like to be governed by rich men, and your Party System is precisely the sort of thing which rich men, when you give them their head, will develop.”
That, put much more shortly and much less didactically, is what many such an elector, to whatever class he may belong, up and down England feels when he hears the Party System attacked; that is the instinctive reply of many such men. How many? Well, it is very difficult to answer that question.
Note that the professions of political faith which the average man will make, the man with two to five pounds a week coming into his house from a small business or employment, or from a skilled trade in which, let us say, his sons are helping him, are not identical with nor even closely connected with his political appetites and instincts. The same man who is delighted to denounce at a public {166} meeting the rapacity of peers will be equally delighted to have as his chairman at the meeting some younger son of a peer who has just decided to call himself a Radical. And such a man will certainly support by his vote and influence any chance party hack against a representative of his own class who shall have made any real attempt to destroy the power of the plutocracy.
In general, it cannot be denied that the Party System, even in this its last moribund and putrescent phase, reposes upon certain habits of thought still persistent in sections of the middle classes and established artisans. When, in the near future, the thin shell still covering the nastiness of the fraud shall break, that part of the nation will be exceedingly annoyed and will blame everyone except the politicians for the bad smell; and one may conclude that no exposure, no appeal, and no criticism will have any real weight in this quarter, because, before they could have weight, routine, which is the main necessity of such lives, would have to disappear.
Upon what practical basis, then, can reform repose? To what instincts or needs can it appeal, and what co-operation will it discover in what fractions of the State?
The practical basis upon which reform must build, if the strength of the nation is to be maintained on its political side, is the basis of public utility.
Both within and without these islands there are {167} tasks set for modern England which the Party System is wholly unable to accomplish.
It cannot meet our prompt, centralised, and lucid rivals abroad, notably the French and the Prussians. It cannot save the mass of the people from an increasing insecurity in their earnings, and economic conditions increasingly intolerable. In the first of these fields the Party System is beginning to make a dangerous fool of itself, alternately denying its own existence, and then, through some panicky move of its tawdry game, seriously weakening England in one or another department of her foreign or colonial policy. In the second of these fields it slowly tinkers: and even when a social reform is in the right direction, its pace is as a pace of one mile an hour where the rate of growth of the evil is as twenty miles an hour; either a social reform produced by the politicians is quite off the point (and this is the case nine times out of ten), or it is negligibly small, or it is hopelessly tardy, and comes too late, with a rush, and is not thought out at all. In both fields, foreign and domestic, the Party System must be superseded, or we shall drop behind our rivals.
That is the practical need to which we must appeal; and of the many fractions of the community to which we can appeal the two most important are the inarticulate and despairing mass which has hitherto never considered the governance of England as in any way concerning it, and the youth which is still deceived (though {168} less and less deceived with every day) by the pretence of the professional politicians.
Motive power, however, will be lacking to any reform, unless men can be convinced that the failure of Parliament has led not only or merely to hypocrisy and a contemptible corruption, the degradation of public life and of public office, but also to real and tangible national peril.
The life of a great nation still in full activity, multitudinous, and even numerically increasing (though that last test is a poor one), is a difficult medium in which to express the perils which may threaten its society.
It is granted on every side that politics have become contemptible, and the political machine ridiculous or provocative of indignation, according to the temper of those who are compelled to observe it.
But this conviction is a very different thing from the conviction that such an evil is productive of direct and tangible danger to the State.
What happens in men’s minds when they turn to-day with disgust from politicians is not so much to remember that the men whom they thus despise are still in theory the masters of the national fate, but to occupy themselves with the living industry and commerce and the living debates of true public opinion.
{169} The State in which we live has no recent experience of war with a great power. Those who write in its Press, or produce the determining mass of its less ephemeral literature, are not as a rule in touch with the tragic poverty of our country and home. There is no sufficiently active sense of danger within or without for men easily to consider what the breakdown of Parliament may mean: yet that breakdown cannot but mean danger, and it is not difficult to show how near and pressing the danger may be behind the mask of content in national life and of farce in the party business.
The breakdown of any society, or of any fundamental institution in society, is but the final phase of a lingering process, the very end of which is catastrophic: so buildings collapse, so men go bankrupt, so drunkards die.
If the sense of danger were acutely present wherever decay was present, the sudden final consequences of decline might always be provided against; but it is in the very nature of decline that it should move by imperceptible steps and as it were comfortable to those who suffer it.
It should be, but it is not, a sufficient argument against anything wholly false, that falsehood, when it is erected into a system, is of its nature destructive. You cannot build upon a lie; and if the chief organ of the State attempts to build upon a lie, it should be (but for most men is not) sufficient proof that the State is thereby grievously imperilled.
{170} In order to enforce the proof of such peril it is necessary (unfortunately) to do something more than to insist upon the general moral rottenness which public falsehood involves. It is necessary to insist upon particular examples in which direct and tangible peril to the State may be illustrated.
Five consequences of the Parliamentary rot may, among others, be chosen as the chief, and each of them can be shown to involve tangible and real peril to the nation.
(1) It puts public responsibility upon men unfitted to bear it.
(2) It defers reform in institutions and the uptaking of new weapons in defence and new methods in life at a rate progressively less than the change in the modern world around us.
(3) It permits minor legislation intensely provocative and unpopular, and therefore causative of intense and increasing friction in the public working of society.
(4) It produces, through the financial corruption of that class which not only legislates but also administrates and judges, an increasing crop of effects wasteful, impoverishing, or directly harmful to the community.
(5) Finally, it prevents the nation as a whole from ordering matters in which an active national opinion is of the first concern; to wit, defence, finance, and foreign policy.
Let us consider these five definite points of peril in detail:
{171} (1) We say in the first place that the Party System puts public responsibility upon the shoulders of men unfitted to bear it.
It will be the tendency of all those who may be indoctrinated by the Party Press (and what other Press is there!) to doubt this truth. The politicians are so much talked of in that Press that men come to think them great and the worthy inheritors of the past. But when some heavy task is suddenly laid upon their shoulders, how contemptible is the collapse! The experiment is not often tried, and the ordeal has not often to be gone through. War is infrequent, grave public tumult more infrequent still, and of the pitiful results of our recent foreign policy the public is kept ignorant. But whenever the curtain is lifted (as it was in the beginning of the South African War, and as it has been for many “superseded” Englishmen since the close of it), the truth of what we say here is apparent.
The type of man who normally succeeds in obtaining office under the rules of the party game is not fit to administer the affairs of State.
There are, of course, elements in the position which mask this dangerous truth. For instance, the professional politician has behind him the very large and excellently trained staff of public officials which some look upon as the ultimate supplanter of the hopeless Parliamentary decline.
Again, a proportion of those who struggle for office, a small and diminishing proportion, are men {172} of outstanding ability who have entered a political career because the money prizes in such a career under our present system are so considerable; and these men, though warped by the necessities of their position, still support the falling standard of ability in the political ring.
We must also count the young men of family who are given office as of right, whose necessities of intrigue are therefore less than those of their middle class colleagues.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that the effect of the Party System on even the cleverer politicians is to reduce the normal level of their intelligence. It is quite incredible that such men as Mr Asquith and Mr Lloyd George, Mr Balfour and Mr F. E. Smith could under any other circumstances give expression to such imbecilities as those which constantly adorn their public speeches. They would not talk like that at dinner or at their clubs. But the standard of intellect in politics is so low that men of moderate mental capacity have to stoop in order to reach it.
Examples of this in men who are after all highly educated, and move in a well-instructed world, will occur to everyone. They could hardly be explained in any other way than by the proportion of energy which is wasted under the Party System in bad rhetoric and worse intrigue, which are utterly useless to the Commonwealth.
We have the Prime Minister telling us that the more capital we export the better; his followers {173} solemnly assuring us that export of capital is equivalent to an export of manufactured goods from this country—simply because they have been given orders to reiterate that absurd proposition. [Note 173.1] We have Mr Chamberlain, some years ago, considering the Seven Years’ War as the consequence and successor of the American War of Independence. We have Mr Goschen telling the House that submarines are the weapon of the weaker power, and that there is nothing odd in England’s being behindhand with them. We have a parallel, many years afterwards, in Mr Haldane’s provision of aviation for British forces. We have Mr Balfour telling us that Lord Milner was of a type “which only this country could produce.” To the honour of the House a certain number of its Members smiled. We have Mr George proclaiming that the financial resources of this country are greater than any in the world. We have the present Minister for Education expressing astonishment (and sincerely feeling it) that the adherence of Catholics was necessary to his scheme which (but for one quarter of the population of South Lancashire) commanded a general acceptation.
Thus, also, the politicians are continually driven to make appeals on grounds which every educated man knows to be absurd, but which are thought (often falsely) to be just good enough for the {174} multitude. Thus everybody knows that £40,000 would be a drop in the ocean in relation to the funds of our political parties—it is less than the usual price of a peerage—yet a man of the intellectual standing of Mr Balfour is induced to echo the foolish outcry about “American dollars,” and to suggest that such a sum in the hands of Mr Redmond constitutes a menace to the purity of English politics. A corresponding case on the other side may be found in the attempt of Liberal politicians to suggest that in consequence of Protection all the inhabitants of the Continent of Europe live on offal, and that the excellent black bread, which many Englishmen go to special restaurants in London to obtain, would be refused with contumely by the British Unemployed. Such suggestions could not be put forward, in the presence of a reasonably educated public, unless the politicians were relying upon the educated classes to connive at the falsehood with the object of deluding the populace.
No doubt the politicians do ascribe this passion for party to their social equals, but that is because in this, as in other matters, they are behind the time. Probably the Press has helped to deceive them.
But in spite of all this the truth remains that the standard of ability, reading, and experience in political life is low, and the continual preoccupation of the politician in petty and personal calculations, and in the struggle to maintain his place against competitors of his own kidney, leaves no {175} sufficient margin of leisure or of energy for any development in his character that may be useful to the State. To these causes of failure we must of course add the power which rich men possess of purchasing executive positions for themselves or their relatives: a power which tends more and more to lower the average of ability upon the two Front Benches.
(2) Next, as we have said, the system involves peril from the tardiness which it imposes upon moral and material reform.
The policy, perhaps a necessary policy, of establishing national granaries has not yet been so much as considered. The fortification of our naval bases has only had questions asked upon it so far; the Party System has not yet chosen to discuss it, and the naval bases of this country are virtually unfortified. The same disease has retarded any thorough remodelling of the military forces of the country. We were for some time (and through party) badly behindhand with submarines; we are still hopelessly behindhand with military aviation; we have not tackled, or have only just begun to tackle, after ten years of petrol traffic, the problem of the roads; there is no attempt as yet to co-ordinate the railway system, legislate upon rates for agricultural produce, or to subject these national bugbears to any effective form of national control,—and so forth. All those things which an active and informed administration would effect by immediate decisions either do not {176} come at all, or come after years wasted in the unfruitful play of partly opposing and partly allied party men.
Two examples of such delays pushed to the point which destroys the utility of a reform are before us.
This country, more than any other European country, had the opportunity of finding revenue from the expansion of its great towns. Provision for the taxation of ground values in those great towns, before the agricultural landlords, over whose fields the towns grew, had acquired an uninterrupted habit and a prescriptive right of complete control, would have richly endowed the State. Nothing was done until this last Budget; and what was done then comes, in the first place, too late to supply revenue on a sufficient scale, and is, in the second place, blunderingly made to apply not to areas specifically urban, but to a number of cases in which the policy produces the maximum of irritation with the minimum of revenue.
The other example is the menacingly rapid expansion of the numbers of unemployed; that is, of destitute men outside the narrow ranks of skilled and organised labour. The whole of this toppling problem has been allowed to accumulate during the present generation, and all that the Party System has managed to do—and that with the object of capturing the so-called “Labour” Party—has been the establishment of “Labour Exchanges,” of which the best that can be said is that {177} they have had no apparent effect, and the worst that they have sometimes proved useful in providing blackleg labour.
While there was a demand for land by small holders it was not met; while there was yet a chance of establishing small ownership in the English counties, no one availed himself of that chance in the political world. The party machine was otherwise employed.
(3) Next, as we have said, to this negative evil there is the positive evil that minor legislation of an intensely unpopular character, and often of an impracticable character, passes almost without comment, because it is not made a matter for party warfare. The Crimes Prevention Act, which is certainly intolerable, and, if we may trust the declarations of the present Home Secretary, is actually breaking down, is a case in point. It was treated as “non-controversial” in the House of Commons; that is, the bosses calmly proposed to agree that a man who had poached three times upon their land, or three times “lifted” the pocket-handkerchiefs or any other trifle of the wealthier classes, should be imprisoned for life at the discretion of his jailers. It was only at the last moment that the discovery of this amazing proposal by a small group of private members so far modified it as to add only five years to the legal maximum sentence; and even in that last atrocious form the House of Commons refused to divide upon it!
{178} The exasperating folly of such clauses (due to the fertile brain of Mr Samuel) as those which make it criminal for a boy to purchase a cigarette (unless it contain hay, or some other weed different from tobacco), and which forbid the poor to send their children for the supper beer, are other examples to the point. The tyrannic tomfoolery of the Black List, now happily dead; the cynical iniquity of the Betting Laws—statutes framed directly in the interests of the rich,—and a host of others, might be cited.
In the near future, unless public opinion is sufficiently alert, Mrs Webb’s amiable proposal that men found out of employment may be compelled to work in prisons—a proposal which is already said to have been agreed on as “non-controversial” by the two Front Benches, and which is gravely entertained in the Minority Report upon the Poor Law—may be law before we know it.
Now these minor things, [Note 178.1] at the best futile, at the worst perhaps only inhuman, do not destroy a State; but an accumulation of them is an accumulation of sand in the bearings. Of late years they have accumulated very fast, and they simply could not have become law if Parliament were even moderately in touch with the public opinion of the country.
{179} (4) Our fourth point, the practical effect of the corruption of the governing class, may be briefly illustrated by the mere mention of three examples: the gross and proved scandals in connection with the South African commissariat, scandals which were admittedly but a sample of the way in which the public millions were stolen, went unpunished.
The politicians refuse to interfere with the Rockefeller Oil Trust and the low flash point upon which it insists.
Land purchase in Ireland, the one wise policy which the wretched machine has ground out in a generation, has stuck: it cannot be started again until the sham-fighters come to some sort of an agreement.
(5) Finally—and the future historian will find this by far the most important point of the whole—those matters which in every healthy state are supremely the concern of public opinion and the mass of the citizens, that is, external relations and defence, have left the sphere of Parliament.
They are said to be “above party”; and so, thank God, they are; but being above party, and therefore above the ridiculous manœuvres of the present House of Commons, no national organ exists whereby they can be nationally handled. The grave problem of India, the position of the English “Advisors” in Egypt, our attitude towards the groups of continental powers, what army we shall have and how it shall be administered—these things are not permitted to occupy the House of {180} Commons for more than a very few hours a year, and the debate upon them is no more than an empty show.
As the House of Commons now is, the rule is undoubtedly a wise one: better a hack politician at the Foreign Office, ignorant of Europe and the world, than men trained in the Party System pretending to speak of foreign affairs, let alone to direct them. Better the blundering action of a professional advocate at the India Office than dangerous protests which could never be followed by action, and that would be uttered by men in the House of Commons whose lack of position at home does not correspond to their fictitious importance in the East.
Yet what could more properly concern a true representative assembly than the establishment and preservation of English power in the great dependencies of England, and the place of England in her international relations with the continent of Europe?
There is no better proof, indeed, at once of the depths to which Parliament has sunk, and of the danger of that decline, than the firm but necessary withdrawal of such entertainment as the discussion of vital policies from the “freely chosen representatives of the nation.” In the absence of the play of public opinion upon these vital policies we are compelled to take the second best, the merely personal decisions of professional politicians acting in secret; but even that has become preferable to {181} the decision of the House of Commons in its present condition of a mere function of the “Machine.”
These are the perils: they are glaring to anyone who will consider his country and its institutions, not as a remote and unchangeable body, but as one of many capable and eager rivals of whom some one or more may at any moment become an eager and capable enemy under arms. … Still more is it true that those who see the social condition of England as it is, and contrast it with the social condition of the countries around it, perceive how acute and immediate, though still masked, are the dangers springing from the degradation of the House of Commons. If ever there was a case for using the discredited phrase, “Something must be done,” the occasion is here.