{205}
In connection with this system of choosing the chief officers of the State, it will be of advantage to pause a moment and consider fully its modern meaning. An evil may often be perfectly well known to exist, and may even have become a commonplace, and yet not be realised. It may be all the less realised, and the conception of it may be all the fainter in the public mind, precisely because it has come to be taken for granted and has become a commonplace. Let us first, therefore, repeat clearly what the process of selection is as compared with that of our great rivals.
In the German Empire the men ultimately responsible for the chief posts of administration are chosen by one man of known character with definite duties attached to his office and under no necessity for intrigue among equals, or for the deception of inferiors. That man is the Emperor; his judgment, being a personal judgment, may be wise or unwise, but it is exercised for public ends and in the public view, and, precisely because it is personal, is subject to public appreciation. It is on this very account that the various men succes-{206}sively picked out in our generation to be responsible for military, naval, and civil matters, stand out as prominent and great; or, again, recede as small and incompetent, and are judged, as it were, upon a certain scale of merit, because their merits and aptitudes are not fictions but realities; they are really chosen for a real work for which they are supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be really apt. And if they fail it is the failure of judgment in those who choose, not a failure of motive.
In the French Republic a method superior from the point of view of democratic theory, inferior in continuity and personal initiative, exists. Ministries are formed in any one of an almost indefinite number of combinations, the object of the one last arranged being to secure the support of a majority in Parliament: and as that majority is, in spite of much corruption and many contemptible features in French Parliamentary life, at least independent of any such self-appointed organisation as “the two Front Benches,” it fluctuates at will; in other words, unless those men are chosen who, each in his own department, can satisfy a majority of the Chamber, the Ministry will be rejected. Sometimes the Ministry will fall as a whole and be replaced by another combination more nearly representing the tone of Parliament at the moment; sometimes members of it prove worthless or unworthy, are dispensed with, and the Ministry is “reconstructed”; but the Ministry must always be representative of a real majority {207} in the Commons, or it is not allowed to administrate, and this is true of each of its important appointments singly as well as of the Cabinet as a whole. There is no machinery for compelling Parliament to accept whatever it may be given in the way of Ministers under pain of dissolution and a general election. Still less is there a permanent understanding between the Radical group and the Conservative group, or their chief men, by which automatic voting can be secured in favour of any combinations “passed and approved” by those chief men behind the scenes.
In the United States of America, where Federal responsibility, though its initiative is of capital importance, covers a more restricted area than the responsibility of British Ministers, it is, as in Germany, the direct and responsible will of one man which is mainly responsible for the choice of the heads of departments, and these are particularly excluded from the action of the Party System, which is almost as rigid as our own. True, that “monarch” is elected upon a party ticket, but it is characteristic of this wise provision for the selection of a single man to exercise ultimate authority at the head of the State, that his personality is ever a capital feature. In proceeding to a Presidential election great National Conventions have the chief influence and weight. Not always, but usually, a real leader emerges from what is not only a real but sometimes a frenzied competition, and one has only to cite the names {208} of the American Presidents to see how large a proportion of them are the names of men who, whether we approve them or disapprove them, acted, led, and did with the objects of the Commonwealth before their eyes. In less than thirty names you may count Washington and Jefferson, Van Buren, the elder Harrison, Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, and Roosevelt, and these are but the most prominent of all.
Now what happens here?
We are not asking what did happen, when, with the machinery apparently similar to our own to-day, very different results were obtained. We are asking what does happen as a fact at the present moment.
What happens is this: an existing set of persons, a dozen or so, distributed between the two Front Benches, exercise the right to recruit their permanent organisation, to recruit it gradually and to recruit it continuously. Over this right Parliament has no actual check. The Crown is reported, once or twice at the most in a whole lifetime, to have some modifying influence in the case of a couple or at most three selections. How far the rumour is true we cannot tell, because the whole process is conducted with that secrecy which has become the rule of our political life. This clique, perpetually recruiting itself by co-option, has become a definite organism separate from the rest of the political body, with the inevitable result that, as we have seen, and as we have insisted upon {209} throughout this book, it has become more and more a family affair, introduction to which is mainly secured by personal and private influence.
Some will argue that a proportion of the men so chosen are and will continue to be of service to the Commonwealth and of ability. That is true—and the flaw in the argument is that it would be equally true under any system of government whatsoever, however corrupt and however self-seeking. The decencies must be maintained, and a certain minimum of efficiency is as necessary to the conduct of this arbitrary form as of any other arbitrary form of government; but it is as true of this arbitrary form as of other arbitrary forms, that they tend to become inefficient in proportion as they escape from public control and public criticism, and the most sanguine can hardly believe that, by a pure coincidence, a little group of men so closely interrelated must continuously and traditionally form the best or even a good selection of public officers.
But (another will object) this same machinery existed in the past, and gave results under which Great Britain continually increased in prosperity and power. This is true; but there were three elements present in the past which have gradually lost effect and are now eliminated: the first was aristocracy, which, whether we approve it or disapprove it, has always had certain characteristics wherever it has existed in a State, among which was the spontaneous selection of a sufficient number of men within its ranks who should pro-{210}perly conduct the common weal. An aristocracy admittedly in power has, in its effects, something of the representative character which a national monarchy possesses; and, what is more, selection being frankly confined to a certain and fairly large area in which is to be discovered one type of man, there is an active and real competition within that area.
Secondly, the Crown possessed a real determining influence which watched over each Ministry and clearly affected it.
Thirdly, and much the most important, there was the real and effective control of Parliament.
To-day all those three salutary factors are gone.
It is true, of course, that there are remains of aristocratic tradition, but they are not dominant. They work only where aristocracy is combined with great wealth, and they prefer great wealth to lineage. Now, it is in the essence of the healthy working of aristocratic institutions that they shall be open, national, and admitted: when they work under tolerance, as it were, and with dwindling effect, their function in the Commonwealth is petty and directly evil.
The influence of the Crown may revive. It is a part of the game the self-appointed clique play today to hint mysteriously from time to time at the existence or revival of that power, but it is not definite, and it is certainly exceedingly weak—if it exists at all. The public knows nothing of it, and if the hints dropped by the professional politicians are as truthful in this connection as their state-{211}ments upon any other matter, they may be safely neglected.
As for the control of Parliament, by far the chief factor, it has utterly disappeared. It is impossible to conceive of any appointment made to either Front Bench, however monstrous or absurd, which would lead to remonstrance from the drilled voting machine which the Front Benches control; nor can any critic of what we here advance point out such remonstrance during the course of many years.
To sum up, the method of recruitment is simply that against which every corporate body particularly and specially guards itself. It is an understood matter, wherever men act in common, in a college, a public company, or any other form of activity, their Executive must be watched, chosen, and controlled; and that the one disease most fatal to the success and health of the whole is the letting of the Executive become a clique which has and exercises the power of appointing friends and relatives in its own renewal. Yet that is exactly what the Executive in the most important corporate body of all has become. The Executive of Parliament is a clique, possessing and using the power to renew itself by the co-option of relatives, connections, and friends; and this method, with just so many exceptions as may keep the system alive, is the normal and recognised method by which we have come to choose those who shall be responsible for the national safety and well-being when next some peril shall arise.
{212}
It is exceedingly important in this connection to observe a due proportion of criticism. That which is concealed, and that the true nature of which is carefully and deliberately misrepresented to the public, cannot be exposed by a mere negation of the public’s false conception. For, in the first place, no such general conception would be held by a great number of men were there not an element of truth in it; and, in the second place, all false intrigue designed to deceive great bodies of men is necessarily careful and tentative in its action.
When, therefore, insistence is laid on the collusion maintained between the leaders of either nominal “side” in the House of Commons, it is not and cannot be meant, by their most ardent critics, that there is neither ground of opposition between them, nor even that collusion is their chief preoccupation. The process may be best compared to one of those active but ordered struggles wherein men find so much of their occupation and even profit: ranging from a game of cards at the least to the great competitive activities of commerce at the greatest.
{213} Now in all such engagements the interest of the sport and (if there is money in it) the avidity for gain bring out real differences of action, real conflicts of object, and even sometimes, and in proportion to the magnitude and sincerity of the affair, real passions.
Were party ever so fictitious, some elements of conflict would still remain. Had all political ideals disappeared in the business, something would have to be invented to play for. But, conversely, were party ever so real or ever so deadly earnest, something would still have to be held in common, which is the security and well-being and order of the community. Thus in the fierce competition of the great capitalists, one thing is still more important than success in the competition, and that is the maintenance by law and armed force of the whole capitalistic system. Thus also, at the other end of the scale, when men play golf or whist or bridge, one thing is more important than winning, and that is seeing that the rules shall be observed, in other words, that the game shall continue to exist and be possible.
It must therefore be granted that though the very maximum of difference were present between true and vivid political ideals, separately held and cherished by the leaders of the two parties, yet for the very existence of government by debate one thing would remain more important than those ideals, namely, the preservation of the system under which they could be discussed, and the decisions {214} of majorities arrived at and upheld. To deny this is to admit what none can admit, save in the rarest and most absolute of conflicts, the need of civil war.
We may imagine, therefore, one leader and his followers, sincerely convinced that a war was morally justifiable, and (what is almost the same thing) of advantage to England; his opponent and his opponent’s followers, as strongly convinced that it was a crime and a national disaster, and yet both those men preserving the decencies of the debate, occasionally conferring upon matters whereon the whole nation was agreed and in which administrative skill was required. We may imagine them using their efforts to keep the House of Commons united after a great defeat in a plan for recovering the national honour; that would not be collusion, that would not afford matter for criticism in the judgment of any but a fanatic.
But as things now stand, the line is drawn at an indefinite distance from this ideal line. The thing which the nominal opponents find it essential to preserve by their secret understanding, is not the security of the country nor even the order of debate, but the conditions under which they and their clique shall retain the opportunities for large salaries within and without the country, and for power. The things on which they prevent division are precisely the things on which opinion is really divided and the policy of the majority is expected to rule. The things which they forbid to arise in {215} debate are precisely those things which form the secret basis of their position, the sale of honours and legislative power, the connection between nominal antagonists, the reform of the procedure of the House, the widening of opportunities for private members, the lowering of salaries, the establishment of control by public committees, and so forth. It is true to say that no one important policy for now fifteen years has been allowed by the two Front Benches to form a clear division in the House of Commons, with the exception of the policy of Women’s Suffrage; and even in this case it lies entirely with the two Front Benches whether that policy, no matter by what majority it may be passed, is to have an opportunity of becoming law, or even of reaching Committee stage. [Note 215.1]
The collusion we speak of is particularly apparent in matters of administration which to-day, in the complexity of public affairs, are of particular importance. It is strikingly apparent where the interests of great financiers are concerned: the Ministerialist who most loudly denounces the power of the rich is seeing to it that a stroke of financial {216} policy carried on by some cosmopolitan banker in Egypt or Ceylon should be kept from the public, and his “opponent” is told of the matter, consulted upon it, and heartily supports it.
All evils tend to reach their remedy by excess, and this evil has certainly come to a pitch which should bring it very near the breaking point. If by some accident leaders have not been able to meet so as to arrange a common policy, a note will be tossed across the table at the House of Commons. Time and again the Whips confer openly to prevent a majority decision upon some matter which keenly divides opinion among rank and file. The common decision to exclude amendments to the Address which are not “official” is no longer secretly negotiated, but part of the open business of the House. When new salaried posts are created, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or whoever else is the responsible Minister in connection with it, will announce his intention of conveying the favoured names to the Front Bench he faces, and will ignore all criticism or questioning from “his own side.”
In fine, it is this basis of collusion, now firmly laid down as the foundation of the whole system, which directly creates what is otherwise inexplicable and what the plain elector marvels at; to wit, the way in which even a real question, once started, at once becomes a false issue and is argued upon premises that neither interest the public nor really concern the vital points of the debate.
Thus it is proposed to increase the salary of one {217} of the clique from £40 to £100 a week; probably the “other half” will hold their tongues—for the money is always in prospect for them later on; but if they argue it they will argue that the office is not “of a dignity” to carry such a salary! As though in this country the dignity of position corresponded with its emolument! Or, again, it is proposed to pay members of Parliament, whereupon an exceedingly wealthy Front Bench man, who has already lifted thousands out of the taxes, will jump up to suggest that the proposition is all very well for those who cannot afford to sit at Westminster, but is in danger of creating “the professional politician.”
Another gentleman in a happy and irresponsible moment proposes the referendum. His “side” all suddenly cry out in chorus (only for a few days it is true) that the referendum is good because it is cheap, clear, and would avoid the turmoil coincident with an election. At once the professionals of the “other side” argue that men voting yes or no on the Licensing Bill, for instance, would not know their own minds, and that the very spirit of democracy requires that a small co-opted clique should govern the country. Nay, the crushing argument is discovered that the word referendum is not of Anglo-Saxon origin, whereupon the original defenders on the first “side” triumphantly substitute the word “poll”; and win.
This done, both parties abandon all mention of the referendum for ever.
{218}
In considering both the evils produced by the Party System and the chance of remedying them, a reader acquainted with English life will at once be met by one of the most important factors in that life: the influence of the daily Press.
In some ways that influence is peculiar to this country; but a statement of its characteristics—the predominance of a very few great daily newspapers, the urban life in which alone the mere suggestion which they represent could have such power, the immense sums necessary to found and to conduct one, the anonymity of the opinions and information they impose and convey—all these are matters so familiar to an English reader that they may be taken for granted.
The Press is certainly devoted to the Party System: more devoted to it than is any part of the State, except the professional politicians themselves. If, then, the Press can be shown to suffer from the pressure of party-machinery, that is, if the party agents actively taint public information, then certainly we have here one of the most evil examples of its influence, and an evil that will be {219} best corrected by the correction of its cause, the Party System itself.
If, on the contrary, the motive force is the other way, if the Press is a voluntary agent freely supporting the Party System and its hypocrisies, then in considering this poison in the source of public information we must attack not the Party System in its connection with the Press, but the Press in its connection with the Party System.
Let us examine the problem.
That the Press is grossly and even ludicrously warped in its connection with our modern machine-made politics no one will deny. The great daily papers are advocates for the one team and the other, and, in connection with political discussion, they never rise above, nor are more intelligent or lively than, mere advocacy. The policy adopted by the so-called “Liberal” team will be enthusiastically defended in the Star, the Daily News, the Manchester Guardian, the Westminster Gazette, etc. The policy put forward by the “other” [Note 219.1] team will be similarly championed by the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Birmingham Daily Post, the Pall Mall Gazette, and so forth. That is a commonplace: and the superficial observer might be tempted to the conclusion—a foreigner would certainly be tempted to it—that the professional politicians were controlling the Press even more thoroughly than they control their hack followers,
{220} and presumably controlling it by the same corrupt methods.
In other words, a first approach to the problem would make us conclude that the Party System was the cause, and the warping of the Press (that is of public information) the effect. Many a man has smiled during the last few weeks to read, in the so-called “Liberal” papers, enthusiastic battle-cries, such as that the “Peers” were opposed to the “People” in the farcical election of last December. Many a man has smiled to read in “Conservative” newspapers majestic eulogies of such few commonplace and second-rate professionals as were shouting in one breath the necessity of defending the ancient Constitution of the country, and the necessity of utterly transforming one of the estates of the realm.
The absurdity of the sorry business is apparent to most readers, but it is particularly apparent to that large class of readers who know how a great newspaper is produced. Who know, for instance, that the writers on such and such a “Conservative” paper are largely Socialist; the chief influence in such another “Free Trade” paper is that of a convinced Protectionist; that the ownership of such and such an organ is divided between men who vaguely profess adherence to both teams, or, as is more common, are indifferent to the success of either.
Knowing such things, one might be tempted to say that they were the product of methods directly {221} corrupt, such as are the familiar and common instruments of the professional politicians.
Now, as a matter of fact, they are not the results of such methods. The pressure of the politicians upon the papers can be exerted only in one form, which is the granting of honours to such of their proprietors as desire those distinctions. That is not a very powerful lever; and, as a matter of fact, it has become rather a matter of routine that such honours should be granted when they are asked for.
For instance, A, B, and C on the Treasury Bench promote a Bill for the nationalisation of a railway. They have the intention, of course, of paying the shareholders (to many of whom they are related) more than it is worth. D, E, and F (cousins, uncles, stepsons, etc. of A, B, and C) formally oppose the Bill, the success of which they ardently desire, and the financial proceeds from which they and their relatives are expecting as eagerly as any.
Mr Muggs owns a newspaper which has been supporting A, B, and C, or perhaps buys it; it continues to support A, B, and C. His brother, Johnnie Muggs, owns an opposition paper, and supports D, E, and F. When the time has come for the two teams to arrange an election and to have “a swing of the pendulum,” that is to swop salaries, Mr Muggs is given his baronetcy or whatnot (no money passes in such cases); and when D, E, and F come in after the election, Johnnie Muggs, within a decent interval, gets the little handle to his name, whatever it may be.
{222} The whole thing is native to the atmosphere of modern politics, and much less corrupt than most features of political life. It would be easy to name half a dozen great owners of newspapers who could perfectly well obtain such honours if they desired them, and who have either refused them or shown no sort of inclination for them. As for places, direct payments, jobs, contracts, and the rest, the Press is, of all the industries in the country, the least touched by the party disease where they are concerned. It would probably be impossible to point to a single case in which the support given by a newspaper to a professional politician could be connected with any money reward of the kind.
Where, then, does the cause lie? What is the motive which makes a man, otherwise honest, and one whose main duty it is to earn his living by conveying true information, talk of the “magnetic personality” of the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman or the “arresting eloquence” of some member of the Churchill or Cecil families?
Primarily, it is the fact that the public, which buys the newspaper, is, by what is now a hard and fossilised journalistic tradition, supposed to desire this sort of farce. There are, of course, great numbers of the middle class, especially in the provinces, who do actually desire to have the game played in this fashion for them in the sheets which they daily read; and though half a dozen independent and instructive newspapers should arise to-morrow, fully capitalised, well advertised, and properly {223} written, yet the mere momentum of custom would cause party to linger in the great body of the Press for many years. It would linger, we may be sure, even though the Party System itself should have disappeared: for instance, traces of it would remain for an appreciable time under the government of an open coalition.
We must take it, then, that the motive of action here is a social force not yet spent, and one which will probably outlive the Party System itself. Something of the sort is to be seen in the matter of religious and historical conventions: the Press feels itself bound to repeat these conventions long after they have ceased to have reality in the minds of its readers; and its readers, on their side, expect this ritual to be performed.
Against a force of this kind there is no immediate remedy. Ridicule, exposure, continual criticism, may rapidly undermine the Party System in action, and may so scatter sand into the bearings of that “machine for grinding wind” that it shall be brought to a standstill. But ridicule, exposure, and the rest will find nothing tangible to work on in the party attitude of the Press, for the simple reason that that attitude is not corrupt, but merely conventional. You can, by the habit of repeated exposure of similar jobs in the past, make a particular professional politician afraid of perpetrating some particular job in the present; and when you have made an appreciable number of the politicians afraid to act corruptly on an appreci-{224}able number of occasions, the Party System will be done for. But in the case of the Press there is nothing to expose. Its attitude is not wicked, it is merely stupid.
The true tactic of those who regret the extension of this disease to the newspapers is to continue their attack upon that Parliamentary game which is not the cause but which is the object of the newspapers’ fatuity. If that game can be slackened down, put off, confused, and so ended, the Press will be ultimately the wholesomer for the change, and will lie less; but its health must come indirectly; no medicine will reach it till the party politician (who is the stock-in-trade of the Press) is made impossible.
Meanwhile it is difficult to see why some man of wealth and enterprise (or some group of men possessed of both these valuable but incongruous qualities) should not start a journal, the object of which should be the conveyance of information rather than the wearisome advocacy of set policies designed in conclave by the “Government” and “Opposition” Benches.
Why should it not be possible for a newspaper to lay before its readers the advantages and disadvantages of a duty on hops, while at the same time giving its readers full information upon the effect of a duty on wheat at five shillings a quarter? Why should its writers not determine against the second and in favour of the first innovation? More important still: why should we not have a {225} stray journal or two which would print what “party” now prevents either “side” of journalism from printing? For instance, why should we not have journals prepared to denounce the sale of legislative power by either team or a corrupt job, whether of the Minister for the Fine Arts, or of his wife’s cousin, the late “Opposition” Minister of Public Worship and Justice? Why should not a newspaper which thought it just to lay an increment tax upon urban land, and asinine to distribute broadcast such a farrago of details and often unanswerable questions as Form Four, express both opinions? They are not logically disconnected!
A journal which thought it necessary to increase the strength of the British Navy in capital ships need not, one would imagine, be bound to hold up Belfast as a model for the rest of Ireland; nor need a paper whose proprietor or staff thought the present expenditure upon the Navy excessive be compelled to regard the drinking of a glass of beer as an enormity.
Most men sunk in the managerial routine of journalism would say there was “no room” for such a paper, “no public” for it, and nothing but financial disaster in front of it.
Those who argue thus can never have noticed how many thousands are daily driven to consult the organs of both the nominal “sides” in order to guess at the truth which an independent journal would have given them without such labour.
{226} There is a public of many, many thousands, especially in London, awaiting such an experiment, and it is noticeable that the best edited of the morning papers, the Daily Mail, continually admits discussion and adverse opinion upon matters in which the public judgment requires rather information and the balance of opinions than advocacy.
However, a pursuit of this consideration would lead us far from the object of our book, and this short section is no more than what we have called it, a “Note.”
It is enough to conclude that no direct remedy is applicable to the existing Party Press: it must drag its weary way a little longer, and continue for a few more years to tell us of the dreadful antagonisms which separate the Siamese Twins of politics.
No policy is possible to the reformer save that of disregarding the official Press, of leaving it on one side, and of advancing upon the only active force remaining to the Party System, the cupidity and intrigues of those few whom it benefits. The Press has long ceased to affect opinion. [Note 226.1]
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