TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ANATOMY OF AN ALTERNATIVE.'
T ORD HALIFAX, greatest and keenest of political JILJ critics, once gave to the world The Anatomy of an Equivalent. We wish that some of the critics of the present Government who grow so zealously angry when we dare to point out that we can find no set of men in sight who are capable of carrying on the war better than the present Cabinet would give us their anatomy of an alternative.' Up till now this is what they have most studiously refused to do. They merely pound the Government and denounce their actions from every point of view, naval, military, and political, and they proclaim in stentorian tones that it must be absurd to declare that there is no alternative, and that those who say so are devoid of wit and patriotism, and so on. But when it comes to the test they have no one to suggest, or, rather, they have only got one or two phantom leaders who are soon used up. At one time it was Sir Edward Carson who was to play the great role. When he seemed to have no inclination for the part proposed for him, and, to his eternal credit, entirely refused to stab his late colleagues in the back, Colonel Churchill became the favourite. We should imagine, however, that after his speech of last Tuesday he will soon be " off " the alter- native menu, and we shall see him replaced by a new favourite—Lord Fisher, Sir Henry Dalziel, or Sir Arthur Markham. We might, indeed, even reach the limit with Mr. Horatio Bottomley.
A striking example of the bankruptcy of the "party of the alternatives in the matter of serious suggestion is to be found in the rewritten introduction which that fascinating historian and man of letters, Mr. Oliver, has prepared for the new edition of his Ordeal by Battle (Macmillan and Co., is. net)—a book with the main intention of which, as our readers know, we are in hearty sympathy, since it is a plea for National Service. The operative part of Mr. Oliver's introduction is a powerful and brilliantly worded indictment of the manner in which the war has been carried on, an indictment with which we and, we predict, most of Mr. Oliver's readers will be in pretty general agreement. It is, however, marred by a vital injustice. It. attributes to what we should call the Coalition Government, or what he calls "the Asquith-Bonar Law Government," the sins of omission and commission of its predecessor. The Coalition, he declares, is not what it pretended to be, a National Government. Again, he tells us that "the Asquith-Bonar Law Government is better in some ways than its predecessor, but much worse in others," and he proceeds to back up his opinion by quo- tations from the Nation! The Nation in the other sense— that is, the British people—has, he declares, been" counting up results," and will soon take steps to remedy the evils with which it is faced. "When its own existence is at stake it may not be quite so powerless to discover and set up an alternative Government as the Whips' Offices and the House of Commons seem to imagine." Later he tells us that if we are to judge the present Government at all, we must judge it by results, and these are not of the sort to win a favourable verdict. Mr. Oliver most properly speaks with great severity of the mismanagement of the Gallipoli expedition, but, with a subtlety and dex- terity which would win our intellectual admiration were not the question so serious, he tries with one hand to destroy the Coalition Government, one-half of which, we may remark, had no responsibility whatever for the initia- tion of the great gamble, and with the other to save Colonel Churchill, whom he apparently regards as a potential Chatham, from any capital blame in the matter. There is nothing, he tells us, to show that Colonel Churchill's project of forcing the Dardanelles by naval action alone would have failed "had it been persevered in firmly," though of course he has to admit that there also is "nothing to show that it would have succeeded." But he adds : "To talk, however, of the Government having been led into the Gallipoli campaign on shore, because Mr. Churchill thought he could force the Dardanelles with the Fleet, is surely the very height of absurdity." "We have heard," he goes on, "of fleets being risked in order to extricate armies which had got into difficulties, but who has ever heard of an army being sent out in order to bring away a fleet I " Never was literary skill used more audaciously to conceal a strategic blunder of the first magnitude. The first thing to remember is that even if Colonel Churchill had been allowed to dash the Navy against the mines and concealed torpedo-tube stations in the Narrows, and certain ships had by some miracle succeeded in getting through, he would have accomplished nothing. The walls of Enver Pasha's Jericho would not have fallen down merely because our battleships were able to throw shells into Constantinople. The Turks, aft -.r a day or two of panic, would, with their usual power of fatalistic endurance, have begun to remember that a landing party of a few thousand Marines can do nothing in a city of a million people with a garrison of, say, a hundred thousand troops. Meanwhile the Straits would have been closed behind our ships. It is quite conceivable that they would have had nothing to do but race up and down the Sea of Marmora, lest they should be caught napping by the enemy's sub- marines or torpedo-boats ! Then, indeed, it would have been necessary to do the very thing that Mr. Oliver flouts— to send out an Army to bring away the Fleet—and very lucky we should have been if we had succeeded in that desperate adventure.
We do not, however, want to elaborate this point further, though much could be said on it. We must turn to Mr. Oliver's main contention, based upon a quotation of the well-known passage in which Bagehot laid down what we could do and ought to do in a great emergency. "We often want at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest to change the helmsman—to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm." Here, of course, all sensible men will agree. Show us a really capable pilot of the storm, a man to whom Nature has given the instinct for weathering the storm, and who will provide the "daemonic element" which is no doubt needed in war, and we would instantly use him to replace the pilot of the calm. For a new Chatham, for a true storm-pilot, who would not sacrifice Mr. Asquith and all his colleagues ? But those who urge this policy must first catch their Chatham, or at any rate give us some indication as to where he is to be found. Till then we have got to endure our present ills lest worse things befall us. Mr. Oliver is of course too skilful a dialectician not to realize the difficulty in which the absence of a visible Chatham or Chatham places him. This is how he meets it :— " But many who are ready to admit the truth of this conclusion are troubled because they can see no alternative. Before we get rid of a bad government, or (if the phrase be preferred) of a govern- ment unsuited to the occasion, we must have something, they say, to put in its place. But when a surgeon has to degl with a case of paralysis, and finds that the mischief is caused by a bony growth which is pressing on the brain, he proceeds at once to remove the bony growth ; he does not stop to ask himself : 'what am I to put in its place ? ' And we are dealing now with the paralysis of a nation. There is always an alternative government, though it may not become clearly visible until the old one has disappeared."
With all due deference to Mr. Oliver, here is nothing but words, and in this particular passage words not very skil- fully chosen. His surgical analogy breaks down the moment it is examined. Unless he can show us a real living storm- pilot, he is mocking us with false hopes. As to who is his man of destiny he gives us no indication whatever, unless, as we have noted before, we are to assume that Colonel Churchill—sometime an anti-National Service party politician—is really a kind of "Chatham-in-waiting," and that the nation has only to throw him the handkerchief to ride to victory and glory. To speak frankly, we do not like the security. Colonel Churchill does not appear to us to be of the stuff out of which Chathams are made. We must admit, however, that he has one great qualification for creating an alternative Ministry, it is obvious from his references to Lord Fisher that he would not have the slightest difficulty in compounding a Ministry out of all his old enemies. We doubt not that he would prove to have a, perfect genius for constructing a Coalition of the Fox and North order.—Colonel Churchill, Prime Minister ; Sir John Simon, Chancellor of the Exchesper ; Mr. Ponsonby, Secretary of State (" democratically con- trolled ") for Foreign Affairs ; Sir Arthur Markham, Minister of War ; Lord Fisher, First Lord of the Admiralty. —Somehow that does not sound to us like the kind of com- bination which would attract the nation, even in the direst extremity. Seriously, a Ministry of all the cranks, all the failures, all the alternatives is not going to win the war. The nation has got to make the best of the situation as it is. It must endeavour to keep the Government up to the mark by earnest, sincere, and co-operative criticism, and from time to time by insisting on the elimination of any "undesirable elements" which may still lurk in the Ministry ; but it is essential to remember a fact in human affairs which may be illustrated by a very homely metaphor. There are a certain number of people who are always changing their servants with the idea that the unknown cook, the unknown butler or parlourmaid, the unknown coachman or chauffeur, must be better than the known. They try to construct their households upon a basis of ideal alternatives. "Anything," they say in a passion," would be better than this idiotic muddler." The result, of course, is chaos. No household is ever well managed where this frenzy prevails. The wise householder does not change unless he can see before him a reasonable prospect of better- ing the servant in being. The wise nation acts upon the same principle. The moment a Chatham appears above the horizon we will all clasp him to our bosoms. Till then let us not hunt chimeras, but get on with the war with the instruments which we have at hand.
Before we leave the subject of Mr. Oliver's introduction we must utter a word of protest against his ungenerous and offensive allusion to Mr. Bonar Law and his "depressing leadership." Unless Mr. Bonar Law had been able to take the reins himself, which it is obvious it was impossible for him to do, it was his duty to do exactly what he did—stand by to help if necessary, and not embarrass, the pilot of the calm who was caught in a tornado.
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