The Liberal Party
OUR sympathy with the Liberal Party in its present plight grows stronger) as our hopes for its immediate power for good grow fainter. Mr. Lloyd George's last address to his followers was most discouraging. He leads the Party, and they are too loyal to dethrone him. They may feel that he is a fish (a goldfish as the Times once suggested) out of water, in the company of Gladstonian or Asquithian stalwarts, and that neither at home nor abroad is he trusted. They are not basely bound by the glitter of his gold, and probably rejoice if his hoards have been depleted to a modest balance since the Election.
Though some speak bitterly of him, remembering only the last ten years, others have a juster sense of the debt which the country should gratefully acknowledge for his War services. He made then, in our opinion, some gross blunders, but they may be decently hidden under the results of his success in quickening the spirit of the Empire. The War called for his qualities of energy and buoyancy, of being able to twist and turn to meet a seemingly shattering blow so that it glanced off and left him ready to strike elsewhere. There was great value, when there was no time for thought, even in his incom- parable powers of rhetoric, that meretricious art.
But these qualities, so valuable and so well used by Mr. Lloyd George in war time, stood on the worst of foundations for the work of peace time, were the most incompatible with the needs of the Peace Conference, and find no place in the painful drudgery of rebuilding a weary and impoverished country. A sure grasp of principles always kept in sight, patience, and a courage to tell unpleasant truths are needed. Lord Oxford had those qualities, and might have built up the Liberal Party and governed the country if his age and Mr. Lloyd George had allowed it. Mr. Baldwin has much of the character needed, as his years of office and the increasing personal respect that he inspires have proved through a longer period than many a prophet allotted to him at the time of Mr. Bonar Law's death. The substance of the address Mr. Lloyd George delivered last week was no doubt carefully dis- cussed by him with other leaders of the Party in both Houses, and when thus cramped, with no free range of his own originality, reckless though it may be, it seems merely doleful to its reader in cold print next day.
We suggested last week that it might be the Party's fate to be gradually squeezed out of life between a Conservative and a Progressive Party. Whether that would be good or bad for the country, there are reasons why we should most deeply regret it. On grounds of history and sentiment we should deplore the end of a party which we supported whole-heartedly until the Home Rule split. Though a small Centre party can cause most harmful difficulties in the lobbies under the Parlia- mentary system as we have developed it by the custom of the Palace of Westminster, it can be of great intellec- tual value there, and this is exceptionally well illustrated to-day. We badly need the, wisdom and experience of Lord Grey, the sound economics of Mr. Runciman, the clear arguments of Sir John Simon's sharp wits, and so on. We shall not get the full value of their services if they speak for nobody but themselves ; witness the loss to the country of Lord Rosebery's continuous ser- vices after his middle age. Again, so long as there is a Liberal Party, we look to it as the best guardian of free xchange, so far as it is left to us in our daily lives and in the commerce of our ports. Obviously we cannot trust that to the Unionists, for they seem to have learned nothing from-the disasters that have come to them from their support of Protection, Fair Trade, Tariff Reform, and even, as we strongly suspect, from Safeguarding ; all shreds and patches at any rate of the same shroud.
But here Mr. Lloyd George depresses us. What is free exchange to him ? What are " peace, retrenchment and reform " ? Peace is claimed with equal sincerity as an aim of every party. Has Mr. Lloyd George preached retrenchment ? No, no more than the Labour Party. His electioneering appeal was to spend huge sums, borrowed from what sources we know not, upon State enterprises of uncertain value, the luxury of a nation with a superfluous income. Worse still, in so dealing with unemployment he would go back almost to Eliza- bethan methods of setting the poor and idle to work, with all their economic and moral evils. He might have left that to a Socialist Party, and we strongly suspect that he will see, without appreciating the irony, the new Government trying to appropriate some of his and Mr. Keynes' proposals, and he will hardly be able to deny them his support. Our leading Socialists nowa- days are growing out of the teaching of Marx and Lassalle, and will probably soon cast Louis Blanc behind them.
Last week we expressed our hope that they will grow saner and saner, following the usual " left-centre " tendency of this country, but equally they may return to mediaeval theories, as Lenin and Signor Mussolini have. If so, public works done by companies of forced labour may be seen in England as once they were in the East when the valleys of the Tigris and the Nile were first irrigated for man's material benefit. Should extinction be the fate of the Liberal Party, it will have the sympathy of all if it goes down flying the flag of liberty, free exchange, freedom of contract, freedom of opinion, and all that it fought for in the past.
We are not yet convinced that all individualism is dead, nor that everyone really believes that bureaucrats can spend his money for him better than he can spend it for himself. We still think that progress comes best from pri- vate enterprise and by trial and error of personal judgment.
We suspect that a Liberal Party calling itself Progressive, in the direction not of more restrictions and imposed organization, but of freedom, might have a great revival.
But granted that an uncalculating love of liberty is now killed by circumstances in Great Britain as it is by persons in Russia and Italy ; that the new spirit of co-operation between the nations, which indeed we bless with every breath, is not compatible with the competition which we have known until now as the life-blood of efficiency ; that the advance of science- in annihilating distance for travel and communication, and so making possible vast organizations of centralized supervision, also makes subordination to centralized authority inevitable ; then, indeed, we see little opening for the Liberal Party as we once knew and supported it. However, we shall not yet sing the Party's dirge ; they may yet be the saviours of the country. We earnestly advise them to hold their hand both from suicide and from any summary action taken before the present Government develops its policy, and before the new Parliament shows how it is going to shape in the lobbies and in debate. They will not forget, we may be sure, that a small increase of votes at the next poll might largely increase the number of their seats, nor will some members fail to remind their Party that a leader who holds fast to Liberal principles will always be a possession of such value that, like Wisdom, he cannot be gotten for gold._ Without stability he cannot command confidence, least of all in a party whose opponents cry out that it tottering to its fall.
Previous page
