PERSONS AND POLITICS OF THE TRANSITION.* ME. A. A. BAUMANN
certainly provckes his readers to thought in these very skilfully written political essays, with their sharpness of phrase, their spice of personal experience, and their aptness of historical and literary quotation. If a stranger in our islands were to read this book, knowing nothing of our politics and our political personages, we think he would wonder why the author, who has been a Member
• Persons and Polities of the Transition. By A. A. Baumann. Leaden: ifato =Ulan and Co. Va. neLl of Parliament, and a candidate more than once, is not among our political leaders. "How many ordinary and uninspired men I see steadily climbing up the ladder," ho might exclaim, "and hero is a man of wit and knowledge who has an admirable command of language and an intense interest in politics, and yet I have not heard people talking about him or reckoning him among the prophets." It is a puzzling thing. Mr. Baumann has gifts which might make the ordinary Member of Parliament weep with envy, and somehow ho has not been exalted to such a position of authority as seems accessible to hundreds of men of inferior intellectual accomplishment. There is an explanation no doubt. Mr. Baumann indirectly offers one himself. He remarks that ho is cursed with a judicial mind, which is the worst of all possessions for a politician. "it is not only," he says, "that I am cursed with the faculty of seeing at least two sides to every ques- tion, but that I am denied the power of pretending that I see only ono." Again in the essay on Lord Randolph Churchill he writes : " The man who is cursed with a judicial mind had better not follow the trade of politics." We doubt, however, whether this is the whole explanation of Mr. Baumann's disagreement with the" trade of politics." There have been distinguished 'men, as there still are, whose habit it was not to state a political case without admitting and meeting the difficulties raised by opponents. A man who is capable of sympathizing with the objector and courteously regarding his criticisms as worthy and serious is in a position of great strength. It may be that it is a form of strength more successfully exercised with the pen than on the platform, but it is nevertheless a strength. After all, when the most judicial mind which one can conceive has balanced the evidence, it must in the vast majority of cases incline to one side or the other. The conclusions of the politician need be no more than this sort of inclination on a balance of evidence, or probability, or expediency. Mr. Balfour has a judicial mind. Mr. Baumann calls it indifferently an ambiguous and indecisive mind unsuited for the racket of party politics. Well, Mr. Balfour, having retired from the leadership of his party, is nevertheless recalled to serve his country now in an office needing the most positive and decisive administrative qualities. We must look further for the explanation. And we think we see it in Mr. Baumann's knack of turning from an argument on a high plane to a paltriness, or unconsidered generalization. Such lapses show that his mind is not really judicial, but is capable of being niggling or cynical at a critical moment.
He says, for example, of the Unionist party in 1900: We spent our 1900 majority mainly on the business of the parson and the publican, a disinterested expenditure to be sure, but as a political speculation hardly fortunate. For the parson has turned Socialist, and the publican ha a lost his influence. We relied on beer and the Bible ; and now nobody drinks beer, and nobody reads the Bible—except the dis- senters, who are Radicals." To take another illustration, Mr. Baumann tells us that having failed to catch the Speaker's eye for a long time when ho wanted to make his maiden speech on the Homo Rule Bill of 1886, he became so desperate that he thought of "tearing up my notes, and preparing a speech in favour of the Bill, going to the Liberal Whip, making a splash and resigning my seat." We wonder whether he means that seriously. We suspect it is intended only as an amusing flourish to indicate the extent of his despair, for the Irish question was the primary question of principle, the be-all and end-all, of that Session. However that may be, the fact that such passages occur in the midst of extremely able and interesting essays is a symptom of a weakness. There must not only be sincerity in a politician's mind, if he is to go far, but a positive assurance of sincerity. If obvious sincerity be there it will outweigh all the alleged disadvantages of the judicial mind.
In writing of Lord Goschen, Speaker Peel, Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Balfour, the Duke of Devonshire and others, and of sueh subjects as the "Collapse of the House of Lords," the "Apparition of Demo- cracy," the "Parliament Act," and "Conservatism and Christianity," Mr. Baumann has always tho purpose of warning us that the old struggle between the " haves " and the " have-nots " will certainly be resumed after the war. The period of which he writes is for him a period of transition because it ended in a "Revolution," and therefore in the opening of a new era ; but the new era will be marked by the same material struggle as before. The " Revolution " was the success of the Liberal party in passing the Trade Disputes Act, the Finance Acts of 1910, the Parliament Act, and the Home Rule Act. "These laws," he says, "are the round and complete triumph of Democracy over Aristocracy." That is rather a loose way of describing what has happened. The truth (which Mr. Baumann no doubt recognizes) is that the delegates of Democracy acquired by the Parliament Act the power of doing what they liked without offering Democracy any guarantee that its wishes would really be interpreted and fulfilled. This is more like the triumph of Oligarchy than of Democracy. If the Oligarchs really desired that the Democracy should have the con- trolling power, they would not object to a Referendum, whereby Demos could answer with a "yes" or 4' no " the simple question: "Does this Bill express your will ? " But the Oligarchs are terrified of nothing snore than of asking that question. We would go so far as to say that if the Referendum were intredneed the Parliament Act would not be a revolutionary measure at all. A serious minority of the Commons, or the House of Lords, could secure a reference to the true ruler of us all—the people. For a long time the Lords bayonet pre- tended to anything more than the power to consult the people. The desire to exercise a veto had disappeared when the Parliament Bill was under discussion. Mr. Baumann's point in reopening the dis- cussion of the Liberal revolutionary Acts is to remind his readers that the principles they represent are not dead but living. "I know," he says, "it is the cant of the hour to say that the war has drawn a sponge across the past and that peace will be followed by universal concord. Let no one believe it." He takes the transition of which ho writes to be only a turn of the wheel in the normal cycle of political affairs— something visibly striking, but without permanent effect upon the character of the human Conflict. In the following words he justifies his method :— "I have observed that at the end of every third generation—a period roughly corresponding to a century—the thoughts and habits of the British nation seem to pass from one phase to another. Without dipping deeply into ancient history, such a transition occurred at the end of the sixteenth century, in the spacious days of Drake and Raleigh and Bacon ; at tho end of the seventeenth century, when the aria- tocraey substituted parliamentary for royal government ; at the end of the eighteenth century, when Burke and Paine between them hammered out the body of opinion that issued in the Reform Bill of 1830; and at the end of the nineteenth century, when the extension of the franchise, compulsory education, the application of science to comfort, and a cheap press transferred power from the upper to the lower class. All transition periods are very interesting, and we are still in mid-channel. Believing as I do that the characters of a few individuals are the deter- minant facts in history, I have given eketches of four or five of the prominent actors in the Victorian transition. They have, of course, no pretensions to biography: most of them are reviews of biographies—no more than personal Impressions. In tumbling over the story of the French Revolution the other day, I was struck by the discovery that the greater part of the materials are journalists' impressions of their contem- poraries. What would Carlyle have done without the news-sheets of Camille Desmoulias 1 How would Macaulay have fared without the pamphlets which it is customary to sneer at as ephemeral ? Or take Dumont's sketch of Mirabeau. Dumont was a Swiss lawyer, who coached Mirabeau, wrote his speeches for him, "fought him up," LS Shelburne said he used to do with Colonel Barre. Short and meagre as it is, how superior is Dumont's picture of Mirabeau to the more ambitious portraits by Brougham, Macaulay, and Carlyle! That is merely because Dumont worked with, sat behind, and listened to Mirabeau. Chance, assisted by choice, having thrown me into Parliament in the middle of the Victorian transition, I have recorded my personal im- pressions of some of the statesmen with whom I worked, behind or opposite to whom I sate, and to whom I listened for many years. Am I presumptuous in hoping that, if I do not interest the present gener- ation, I may be of some small use to the future historian ? "
Several of Mr. Baumann's judgments seem to us so apt to the times and so concisely stated that we wish we could quote them all. But we must choose only two for special notice. He remarks that if the Tariff Reformers had over seriously placed their recommendations on a moral basis they would have disarmed an enormous amount of criticism. That is quite true. Suppose they had played the card of" national security " ? How different the attitude of those who dreaded the coming attack from Germany would necessarily have been I Mr. Baumann says :— "The mistake made by the Tariff Reformers was that they rested their case on economic, instead of on moral and political, grounds. Instead of saying boldly, It is dangerous to rely so largely on foreign supplies of food, we must subsidise agriculture ; and it is madness to be absolutely dependent on Germany for chemicals, spelter, sugar, and dyes, we must protect those trades at home, they muddled themselves and their audiences by absurd calculations to prove that more money would be made by Tariff Reform than by Free Exchange."
The other passage we must mention is the very able discussion of the Fabian ideal that the "working class" should be guaranteed against "the worry of insecurity." This policy of " guarantism " (terrible word) had almost been agreed upon before the war by the intelleotual Socialists and the Independent Labour Party. Here is the programme : "1. Higher wages, with a guaranteed minimum for all. 2. Shorter hours. 3. The education, doctoring, and feeding of their children (" national minimum of child nurture "). 4. Better houses at non- commercial rents. 5. All doctors' bills of adults to be paid, and hospital and sanatorium treatment to be provided. 6. Payment during unem- ployment, or provision of State relief works. 7. The abolition of workhouses."
As Mr. Baumann says, "it is a tolerably complete catalogue of wants s the only noticeable omissions are the provision of clothes and pocket. money." What the Fabians want is a State tyranny over people too far pauperized to resist. An illustration of the tendency is the recent preposterous proposal that no working man should be allowed to accept an engagement after the war except through the Labour Exchanges. The Fabians are not without influence in Government Departments. This is a movement, therefore, to be carefully watched. For the State to protect primary and essential industries with a view to national security is one thing ; for it to introduce an uneconomic system for its own sake is quite another.
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