MR. CHAMBERLAIN
By WILSON HARRIS
EVILLE CHAMBERLAIN has died before the dust of 01 controversy that his Premiership stirred up has begun to settle. He has been the object of bitter criticism, almost in some quarters of bitter hate. Some of the criticism was fair, much unfair. Parrot-cries about appeasement and the old men of Munich were current coin on the lips, or pen-points, of people who could not have argued intelligently about Munich for thirty seconds. There is plenty of ground for deciding, after an unprejudiced balance of all the factors, that however well-intentioned Mr. Chamberlain's policy at Munich was it was fundamentally wrong, just as there is plenty of ground for deciding the opposite. But condemnation dictated by confused emotion is one of democracy's worst vices, and the ex-Prime Minister has been the latest victim of it. If his death necessi- tates some assessment of his life it can only be an interim assessment, for history cannot write its dispassionate verdict yet. A decade of the honourable retirement he so well deserved would have left perspectives clearer and made judgements surer and more discerning.
Any estimate on the morrow of a death must be based on truth, tempered, but never obscured, by charity. Virtues may be stressed, but not so that shortcomings are blotted out. Neville Chamberlain's outstanding virtue was an unswerving conscientiousness, a self-sacrificing sense of duty and, as part of that, an immense and tireless industry. He was not an ambitious man. His father had designated Austen as the states- man ; Neville was to stick to business life—even municipal activities were only an afterthought—and the younger son accepted his destiny without demur. He found himself at Westminster through one of Mr. Lloyd George's impulses. A National Service Department was created in 1916 and a Direc- tor to run it was wanted on the spur of the moment. Why not the Lord Mayor of Birmingham? someone suggested. Admir- able. Austen was commissioned to lay hands on Neville forth- with, offer him the post and see that he took it. "I don't like it," Neville said. "I know I can do my present work. I don't know about this. It will be all new to me, but I suppose I have no right to refuse." So he accepted. The thing was a fiasco because the post had never been thought out. Its creation had served as window-dressing ; after that the new Director mattered little to anyone. But it had elicited the disclosure of one of his rules of life—" I suppose I have no right to refuse."
In the same spirit he accepted the leadership of the Con- servative Party in 1930. "His unselfishness in taking it even temporarily," wrote Sir Austen, "was recognised on all hands." In the same spirit, again, he consented to be Postmaster-General in Mr. Bonar Law's administration in 1922, after the downfall of the Coalition Government and a split which left Austen Chamberlain in one camp and Neville in the other ; it was the sternest strain the remarkable affection which existed between the two brothers ever had to bear. If he may be said to have had any ambition it came late in life—not to be Prime Minister ; that was a duty which he had "no right to refuse" ; but to realise his father's dream and commit his country to a Protectionist policy. To introduce a Tariff Reform budget in the House of Commons and go to Ottawa as head of the British delegation to institute Imperial Preference was a greater satisfaction than to kiss hands as First Lord of the Treasury in succession to Mr. Baldwin.
For a nation of shop-keepers we have been strangely reluctant to put business men in the chief place in the State. It is curious, too, that when in the twentieth century that innovation was countenanced it should be the aristocratic party which found the candidates, in Bonar Law and Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Whatever may be the case of the two former, It is easy to trace the effect of a business training in Neville Chamberlain's efficient administration as Minister of Health and his grasp of detail as member of the War Cabinet in the few months when he guided the work of various Cabinet Committees after his resignation of the Premiership. In that respect at least he was abler than he let men see. For he was a reticent man, if not a shy man, as he was a simple and un- imaginative man. What he said of Austen: " He was always what Dr. Johnson used to describe as a ' clubbable ' man ; that is to say, he was naturally sociable and delightful in company," denoted one of the marked differences between the brotners.
He was not, as a rule, fortunate in speech. He could make a plain statement admirably. His war-surveys in the House of Commons, pedestrian though they may seem beside Mr. Churchill's brilliant reviews, served their purpose well and won deserved approval. Nothing, moreover, could have been more impressive in its simplicity than the wireless announcement to the nation of war with Germany, or of the speaker's own resignation of the Premiership last May. But his capacity for saying the wrong thing en occasion was considerable. The classic example, of course, was the assurance of "Peace in our time" after Munich. That might be forgiven an exhausted man, reacting after an almost intolerable strain. But there was no such excuse for the declaration, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, that the continuance of sanctions against Italy was "midsummer madness," though no abandonment of sanctions had been announced by the Government of which he was a member. And the cold objectivity of his speech in the House of Commons on the occupation of Prague was only in part redeemed by the warm denunciation of the crime in his address to the Chamber of Commerce at Birmingham twenty-four hours later.
That event, the seizure of the whole of Czecho-Slovakia by Hitler, was the turning-point in Chamberlain's policy. Till then he had believed, like a great many honest and intelligent Englishmen, that Hitler had a fixed and limited ambition, to gather all German populations within the aegis of the Reich, and peace at that price was, in Chamberlain's view, better at least than a European war. That was one explanation of his deal at Munich. It was not the only one. There was another at least as potent. Great Britain at the time of Munich was in no coalition to fight. Still less was France, with her almost non-existent air-force--even if she had been willing to fight at all for the Czechs. Chamberlain, it may be said, who had been a leading member, indeed the second member, of the Cabinet for seven years, must bear full responsibility for Britain's defencelessness. He must. But it does not lie with political critics who consistently and bitterly opposed rearma- ment through the vital years of the middle 'thirties to reproach the Government in which Mr. Chamberlain was first deputy- leader and then leader with failing to carry through a policy which the Opposition did everything it could to thwart.
That does not shake the conclusion that for Mr. Chamberlain to determine to be his own Foreign Minister was a grave mistake. Mr. Eden resigned the Foreign Office in 1938 because he believed in standing up to Mussolini, while the Prime Minister preferred a pact. There is little doubt now which was right. Those critical days were no time for a business man to make his debut as diplomat plenipotentiary, still less to accompany that departure by the substitution of the Chief Industrial Adviser to H.M. Government for the Chief Diplomatic Adviser as personal mentor and consultant. Marshal Petain thought he could negotiate with Herr Hitler as one soldier with another. Mr. Chamberlain thought he could strike a bargain with him as one business man with another. Both were wrong. Neither realised that only the devil could negotiate with Hitler on equal terms, and both have paid (and forced on others) a heavy penalty for that oversight. Mr. Chamberlain's fault was not in choosing peace instead of war at Munich—there was no alternative unless he was ready to choose defeat,,and the breathing-space he secured has proved our salvation—but in his responsibility for the position in which his country stood at Munich and in the profoundly mistaken enthusiasm with which he presented the Munich agreement to Parliament and people as a great and honourable achievement instead of as a disaster only tolerable as a means of averting (though it did not in fact avert) something even worse. More than that need not be said of Munich. Less cannot be.
And this must be added. At what moment the drift to war could have been checked will always be a matter of argu- ment, but the situation had got very nearly past retrieving before Mr. Chamberlain became Prime Minister. If it be a sin to strive for peace he was no doubt the most offending soul alive. He strove to the very edge of war, and failed, but his striving will never weigh in the scale against him„ If he had courted war sooner he might have taken a divided country into it. His foreign policy will long, perhaps always, remain a subject of sharp contention. But on his courage, his unswerving integrity, his utterly selfless devotion to duty as he saw it, there can never be two opinions. And those are qualities which this country rates high in its public servants. They will give Neville Chamberlain an assured and honoured place in its history.
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