Asquith (23 page)

1
_{The remark was originally made by the Mayor of Mafeking. Chamber-lain quoted it, with attribution, in a speech at Tunstall, Staffordshire, on September 27th. At that stage it did not attract great publicity. A few days later he was asked to send a message to the Heywood division of Lancashire and repeated the phrase, this time without attribution. In transmission it was changed to “ A seat lost to the Government is a seat sold to the Boers.” The new version produced an even sharper storm of Liberal protest than the original would have done, but the protesters, quite naturally, were not greatly mollified when a correction was published. In any case, on innumerable Unionist posters, the slogan was soon appearing as “ a vote for a Liberal is a vote for the Boers.”}

2
_{The lines of dispute were as usual a little blurred, but the following is a rough guide to the position:}

_{(a)
the right of the Liberal Party, while critical of Chamberlain’s diplomacy, believed that the Boers had caused the war by their ultimatum, and that the only tolerable outcome was British annexation of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State:}

_{(b)
the centre thought that the British Government was more responsible for the outbreak of the war, but accepted that, it having started, British annexation of the two republics was bound to follow:}

_{(
c
)
the left believed that the Boers were broadly right.}

3
_{Campbell-Bannerman, paradoxically, accepted the need for this earlier than did Asquith.}

4
_{C
ampbell-Bannerman, unwisely some of his friends judged, had asked in a speech at Leicester on February 19th (notable also for a firm pinning of his colours to all the old Liberal masts) whether Lord Rosebery spoke from “ the interior of our political tabernacle or from some vantage ground}

Following close behind these other changes there came a change in the premiership. On July 10th, 1902, Lord Salisbury resigned and was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour. Balfour held office for three years and five months, and his period at 10, Downing Street is now commonly regarded as one of failure—almost of disaster. From an electoral point of view it was. Not only did it lead up to a massacre of Unionists at the 1906 general election, but it was punctuated by a constant series of by-election defeats. These underlined the narrow basis of support upon which Balfour was operating, as did the unusual number of policy resignations from his Cabinet. In this way he lost the two dominant personalities of the Government, Chamberlain and Devonshire (as Hartington had become), as well as a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Secretary of State for India, and one for Scotland, and a Chief Secretary for Ireland. All but the last of these resignations arose out of the tariff reform issue, which Chamberlain threw into the centre of politics in May, 1903, and which caused Balfour to equivocate for the remainder of his premiership.

In spite of electoral weakness, internal schism, and tergiversation at the top on what appeared the most important issue of the day, the Government was in reality one of significant achievement. In his three and a half years Balfour accomplished more than his uncle had done in the preceding seven. He concluded the entente with France, he set up the Committee of Imperial Defence, and he pushed through the Education Bill of 1902. All three of these changes had a powerful long-term effect upon the development of the country.

The Education Bill was controversial for reasons which are now difficult fully to comprehend. Asquith described it as a piece of “ reactionary domestic legislation,” and his view was shared by almost
every Liberal and by many Unionists as well. Only in a sectarian sense was it reactionary; educationally it was on balance progressive. But the politics of education were in those days dominated by sectarian questions, and Haldane, with a remarkable indifference to the frequency of his disagreements with the party leadership, was almost unique amongst Liberals in thinking that a national system of secondary education and the concentration of educational responsibility upon the major local government units—the country councils and county boroughs—was well worth the loss of the old school boards and the provision of ratepayers’ money for the voluntary schools. It was this last provision, in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that it was certain to lead to an improvement in the standards of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Schools, which aroused the Nonconformists and hence the Liberal Party. It also disaffected Joseph Chamberlain, who, in spite of everything which had happened since 1886, could not quite forget that it was the cause of non-sectarian education which had first given him national prominence. “ I told you that your Education Bill would destroy your own party,” he wrote gloomily to the Duke of Devonshire. “ It has done so. Our best friends are leaving us by scores and hundreds, and they will not come back.”
^a
Chamberlain, however, did not choose to desert the Government on the issue. He merely allowed it to be one of a number of influences which sent him sulkily off to spend the winter of 1902-3 in South Africa. But as his musings while there led to his resignation on a still more explosive issue in the following September the fissiparous effects of the Education Bill upon the Unionist Party were not negligible.

Still more important was its unifying effect upon the Liberal Party. There have indeed been few bills which served a greater variety of useful purposes. Thanks largely to the cool nerve of Balfour himself it was law by the end of the year and began immediately to improve British education. But the act of passing it greatly weakened the Government, which had been long enough in power. And the act of opposing it greatly strengthened the Liberal Party, the persistent feebleness of which had imbalanced politics since 1886.

Asquith, like Rosebery and (a little more doubtfully) Grey, did not share Haldane’s non-partisan position on the bill. He took a full and even a leading part in the opposition to it. He spoke frequently in the House on the subject and he shared the platform with Campbell-Bannerman at several of the major demonstrations which were
organised outside. On these occasions he committed himself fully against all the main provisions of the bill and not merely against the rate subsidy for voluntary schools. “ To sum the matter up,” he said at the St. James’s Hall in London on November 19th, “ you have here a bill which absolutely upsets and revolutionizes the existing system of education. It abolishes the School Boards and establishes in place of them a non-representative authority.” Yet the education controversy, along its traditional sectarian lines, was never one in which Asquith felt deeply involved or completely at home. There was too much Celtic excitement on his own side and too much intellectual force on the other for this to be so. The part he played in opposition to the 1902 Act was less important for its own sake than as a prelude to the fiscal controversy which began in the following year. This second controversy completely engaged Asquith’s political attention, and was perfectly suited to his combination of talents. It was also central to the reestablishment of his position with the Liberal Party as a whole. The educational prelude meant that when the fiscal issue exploded upon the country he was already well-placed to take the lead in opposition to Chamberlain. A year earlier it would have been more difficult for him.

This explosion occurred on May 15th, 1903. On that evening Chamberlain used the familiar platform of the Birmingham Town Hall to divert the stream of English politics. He had returned to England in March with his temper no better than it had been when he left in November. His grievance about education might have faded, but it was more than replaced by his discovery that Ritchie, the new Chancellor, was determined to repeal the 1/- duty on corn which Hicks-Beach had introduced in the previous budget and which Chamberlain believed could be used for a limited experiment in imperial preference. Three weeks before the Birmingham speech the budget announcing this repeal had been introduced. Balfour was trying to hold the Cabinet together on the basis of acceptance of the budget on the one hand and a summer of enquiry into imperial preference on the other. Chamber-lain on May 15th made it abundantly clear that there was no question of his waiting for the results of the enquiry and that he would interpret the compromise exactly as he liked.

“ You can burn your leaflets,” he had told the Liberal Chief Whip. “ We are going to talk about something else.” The confident arrogance of this statement was more than justified by the effect of the Birming
ham speech. With an almost contemptuous ease, Chamberlain there set himself to show that, although Balfour might be Prime Minister, it was he who determined the course of politics. He began by dismissing the current subjects of dispute. In South Africa his “ party weapons had become a little rusty ” and he had returned in no mood to excite himself about matters like the Education Bill or temperance reform. Perhaps, he added sardonically, “ the calm which is induced by the solitude of the illimitable veldt may have affected my constitution.” The “ constitution ” of the Empire, he believed, was also in grave danger of being affected. Unless it could be held together by material ties, which meant preferential duties, it would inevitably disintegrate. The country had to choose between the fostering of imperial unity and “ an entirely artificial and wrong interpretation which has been placed upon the doctrines of Free Trade by a small remnant of Little Englanders of the Manchester School who now professed to be the sole repositories of the doctrine of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright"

He also advocated retaliatory duties against foreign countries, and this second proposal led later to his placing increasing reliance, as a prop to his argument, on the depressed condition of British trade.
¹
For the moment, however, it was the imperial argument which was to the fore, and Chamberlain made no effort to soften the conflict of ideas which was involved. “ If you are to give a preference to the colonies,” he said in the House of Commons a few days after Birmingham, “ you must put a tax on food.”