BOOKS.
LORD MORLEY'S RECOLLECTIONS:* [CONCLUDING NOTICE.]
THERE is a short but pregnant chapter in Lord Morley's second volume in which he refers to his Roman. Lecture of 1897 on Machiavelli as " a tract before the times." He had reminded his hearers that Machiavelliem was " a strong contemporary and abiding influence ' because energy, force, will, violence, Mill keep alive in the world their resistance to the control of justice and conscience, humanity and right.'" Upon this, in those days of peace, there arose a controversy. Lord Morley, " who had respect- fully drawn public attention to certain awkward posers from Machiavelli, had wound up with no firm answers of his own," and was rebuked for not being a plain dealer. Mr. Greenwood took the side of the Florentine against Mr. Frederic Harrison, and Professor Villari, the historian of Machiavelli's age, intervened to suggest that " all must depend on the application of your ethical principles to the case for action." Mr. Greenwood defined the issue to be " whether, if there be no other way of keeping your country from deterioration, you may do all that a wild animal, red in tooth and claw, may do in like danger." Twenty years ago, this was a matter for literary debate ; to-day it is a desperately practical issue. Though Lord Morley does little more than state the problem, he suggests its infinite complexity, and quotes in conclusion is famous passage from Bishop Butler's sermon on the execution of Charles I.:—
" Tyranny and faction and unjust wars and persecution, by which the earth has been laid waste ; all this has all along been carried on with pretences; of Truth, Right, and General Good. So it is men cannot find in their heart to join in such things, without ouch honest words to be the bond of the union, though they know among themselves that they are only words, and often though they know that everybody else knows it too."
Those words illustrate the psychology of the many decent and law-abiding Germans who have been led by their rulers to do such horrible things in this war.
Lord Morley had, ho says, discussed the composition of a Liberal Cabinet with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as early as January, 1905, eleven months before Mr. Balfour resigned, and had arranged to take the India Office. " Within limits, you would have what you like," said his leader, who was resolved also to appoint Mr. Bryce, as he then was, to the Irish Office, much to Lord Xtorley's astonishment. When the Cabinet was formed and the new Secre- tary for India installed, Lord Morley's first business was to settle the Indian Army dispute in a way which the results have not justified, and to press for the adoption of conciliatory methods in dealing with unrest. His weekly letters to Lord Minto are quoted very freely, and show the inner history of the reforms which the two men carried out. " The ingenious saying-that British rulers of India with a supreme Parliament at home are like men bound to make their watches keep time in two longitudes at once, was now to be sharply tested." But Lord Morley, in his very warm tribute to Lord Minto, declares that there was always R good mutual understanding between them :- " We were most happily alike, if I may use again some old words of my own, in aversion to an quackery and cant, whether it be the quackery of hurried violence dissembling sus love of order, or the cant of unsound and misapplied sentiment, divoneed from know- ledge and untouched by cool comprehension of realities."
Lord Morley's letters show that the initiative in proposing to appoint a Native Member of the Viceroy's Council was taken by Trim in June, 1903, but he was careful to let the Viceroy make the first public move in this direction. Lord Minto was not unfavourable to the suggestion, but hesitated for so long a time to adopt it that Lord Morley had again and again to apply the spur, KingEdward, he tells us, was strongly opposed to the idea, but yielded in the spring of 1909 to the unanimous advice of the Cabinet :- " I do not conceal from myself that, on whatever line we may choose to argue it to-day, it is a far-reaching and deep-reaching move. When I opened it to the Cabinet, I said, No more important topic has ever been brought before a Cabinet.' Speaking to Alfred Lyall after, I told him what I had said. ` Absolutely true,' he answered, ' about India. No more momentous Indian topic has over been settled.' He is staunch for it, and I do not know of any • Recollections. By Viscount Morley, 2 TOIL London Macmillan and Ca 1250. net.] more competent judgment. The last stage has been far from agreeable to me. As I told you, I wrote to Biarritz a letter, putting the thing in as good a way as I could, meeting especially one or two misapprehensions that I knew to exist in the mind of H.M. A prompt. reply reached me last Monday, evidently written with much strong feeling, protesting' against the whole proceeding, but admitting that there was no alternative against a unanimous Cabinet. To this I answered by sending the formal submission, and a very short covering letter, doing full justice—well deserved— to the trouble H.M. had taken in forming his judgment ; recognising the force of some adverse arguments ; only pointing out that with- drawal from the Native Member now would chill and check the warm response in India to the policy of Reforms announced in his message of November last ; and finally expressing my belief that this marked fulfilment of the historic promise of Queen Victoria in 1858, that race and colour should be no bar, would secure for him a lasting place in the affections of Indian subjects of the Crown. I am afraid he will count all this no more than idle words ; they won't reconcile him to the step ; but at any rate I have done my beat, and the step is taken. I shall watch with eager interest how it will go on your side of the water, both for your sake there, and mine here."
Lord Morley admits, too, that in his refusal to nominate Lord Kitchener as Viceroy he ran counter to the known desire of the late King. On April 29th, 1910, he wrote to Lord Minto " In my own case the weeks and their excitements have come to a sort of climax, by reason of the arrival on the stage of Lord Kitchener. It has set going, as I foresaw that it would, a tremendous clatter which may possibly swell. The greatest man in the Empire —what are you going to do with him ? Strong man—that's what we want t ' He came to see me on his arrival. I was a good deal astonished, for I had expected a silent, stiff, moody hero. Behold, he was the most cheerful and cordial and outspoken of men, and he hammered away loud and strong, with free gestures and high tones. He used the warmest language, as to which I was in no need of any emphasis, about yourself ; it was very agreeable to hear, you may be certain. Re has the poorest opinion possible of your Council, not as an institution, but of its present members. He talked about the Partition of Bengal in a way that rather made me open my eyes ; for, although he hardly went so far as to favour reversal, he was persuaded that we must do something in bringing the people of the two severed portions into some species of unity. We got on very well indeed—he and I—for nothing was said about his going back to India as Governor-General. At night he dined alone with Haldane, and there he expressed his firm expectation with perfect frankness, and even a sort of vehemence. Haldane told him that the decision would be mine ; whatever my decision might be, the P.M. would back it (though, by the way, I hear that the P.M. personally would be much better pleased if the lot fell upon K.). I got him to dine with me one night ; only Haldane and Esher besides. Curiously interesting. To-day I had an audi- ence in high quarters, and found the atmosphere almost torrid in the same direction. However, the end of it was that I promised to turn all the arguments over again in my mind, until the holiday comes to an and four weeks from now. In spite of strong opinion of his own, the King parted from me with singular kindness and geniality."
A week later King Edward was dead, and Lord Morley was recalling again the genial courtesy with which the King had premed his point, without " anything like overweening insistence," ho that last interview. King Edward, in the pages of this cool and dispassionate observer, seems more than ever the model of a Constitutional monarch. Of his keen interest in diplomacy we are vouch- safed a glimpse in a letter of October 7th, 1908, just after Austria had torn up the Berlin Treaty and annexed Bosnia. Lord Morley was at the moment Minister in attendance at Balmoral r- " To-day the barometer points to a pacific solution, but there has been such a quantity of intrigue, secrecy, and downright lying, that we don't know whether we stand on firm ground or on treacher- ous bog. At the best, we have a mighty uncomfortable time before us and before Europe. . . . At the station at Aberdeen I came upon Mensdorff fresh from Vienna on his way to Balmoral, and the bearer of a special message to H.M. You know the intense interest of the King in foreign policy, and his intimate first-hand knowledge both of the players and the cards in the Balkan game. When I was up here last autumn he found time to take me two long drives through the forest, and splendid scenery it is. I did not much wonder when he told me that if he could have chosen his life he would have liked to be a landscape gardener. It will need a clever set of gardeners, with good strong axes, to trim the diabolic Balkan thickets. I admired the diligence, attention, and shrewd sense with which he tackled the cunning tangle."
The Secretary of State was, as we always supposed, jealous of his full Constitutional authority. He rebuked the Indian Govern- ment somewhat sharply for raising difficulties about a Russo- British agreement in regard to Persia. "The G. of I.," ho wrote, " is by no moans the Man on the Spot." Commenting on a memoir from the Indian Government on the Baghdad Railway question, he wrote " Really it was painfully wide of the mark. I am sure that if you think of it, you will see that it could not be anything else. Your F.O. is and must be what I will venture to call pro- vincial." He repeatedly reminded Lord Minto that the Indian Government must be ultimately responsible to the House of Commons. The Viceroy, he said, had no grievance against the Parliament of 1900. " So, when you say that the modem H. of C. is perhaps the greatest danger to the continuance of our rule in India,' I cannot for the life of me discover any evidence, so far, for any proposition of that formidable kind—quite the contrary." Lord Morley was always insisting on the need for caution and clemency in dealing with sedition-mongers. Writing on August 26th, 1909, concerning some prosecutions, he used the final argument of a threatened resignation :— " You will say to me, ' These legal proceedings are at bottom acts of war against rebels, and locking a rebel up for life is mom affable and polite than blowing him from a gun r you must not measure such sentences by the ordinary standards of a law-court ; they are the natural and proper penalties for Mutiny, and the Judge on the bench is really the Provost-Marshal in disguise.' Well, be it so. But if you push me into a position of this sort— and I don't deny that it is a perfectly tenable position, if you like— then I drop reforms. I won't talk any more about the Now Spirit of the Times ; and I'll toll Asquith that I'm not the man for the work, and that what it needs, if he can put his hand on him, is a good sound, old-fashioned Eldonian Secretary of State. Pray„remember that there is to be a return of these sentences laid before Parlia- ment. They will be discussed, and somebody will have to defend them. That somebody I won't be."
He told Lord Minto that when our present King, then Prince of Wales, returned from his tour in the spring of 1900, " his keyword " was " that we should get on better if our administrators showed wider sympathy."! He quoted, on Lord Midleton's authority, a saying of the late Lord Cromer's "to the effect that in Egypt standing principle with him had always been to employ a Native wherever it was at all possible, in spite of the fact that the Native was comparatively inefficient and that a European would do it a vast deal better. ' Now,' he said, ' that is where the Government of India go wrong, and ham always gone wrong ; they find the Native less competent, or not competent at all, and then they employ an Englishman instead. You lose more by the effect on popular content than you gain by having your work better done.'" All this portion of Lord Morley's book seems to us of great value and interest for the light that it sheds on the relations sub- sisting between Delhi, Whitehall, and. Westminster, whatever may be thought of the details of Lord Morley's administrative policy.
Lord Morley records briefly his impressions of the German Emperor, who visited England in 1907 and again in 1911, each time in connexion with the Baghdad Railway:—
" I saw much of him at Windsor, and was surprised at his gaiety, freedom, naturalness, geniality, and good.humour—evidently unaffected. He greeted me with mock salaams and other marks of oriental obeisance. Seriously he put me through my paced about India. When I talked, as we all should, about the impossi- bility of forecasting British rule in the Indian future, he hit hie hand vehemently on his knee, with a vehement exclamation to match, that British rule would last for ever. When I told this to Lord Roberts he laughed and said, The Emperor doesn't know much about the facts. . . . One impression—and in my eyes it is a golden impression—he appears to have left in the mind of every- body, namely, that he does really desire and intend Peace. You may laugh at this in view of the fine brand-new Naval programme which the Germans have launched at a moment supremely incon- venient to H.M.'s Government."
It is pathetic to recall those lost illusions and to compare them, say, with the " Willy.Nicky " correspondence of throe years before. In dissembling his envy and hatred of Great Britain, the Emperor surpassed Bismarck himself in his dealings with Napoleon III. The book ends with an account of that " crisis in prerogative," the acceptance of the Parliament Bill by the House of Lords, in which Lord Morley played a leading part. He justly attributes to the Primate, who changed his mind in the course of the debate, the outcome of the critical division, in which the Bill was carried by a majority of seventeen. We cannot refrain, in closing this memorable book, from quoting two pithy sayings. "A successful politician "—this was addressed to Mr. Churchill—" needs a good deal more than skill in mere computation of other people's opinions without anxiety about his own." " I am sometimes emoted, trifle horrified, when I contrast the loose free-and-easy way in which politicians form their judgments with the strict standards of proof., evidence, fact, observed by every conscientious critic or historian" —a text on which the reader can comment for himself.
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