TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEMESIS OF PARTISANSHIP. THE Liberal papers are very indignant, and no wonder, at the way in which the General Election has been forced upon the country at a moment when some two millions of the men who have the best right to decide upon the future of the United Kingdom and the Empire will be unable to give their votes, or at any rate will be compelled to give them under conditions which make it almost impossible for them to exercise their political duties with due efficiency. Further, owing to the working of the Party system in Single-Member Constituencies and the appearance of the Group system, and of Group combinations, the Party Whips and the Party Organizations—i.e., the Caucus—have been given an opportunity for manipulating the elections such as has never occurred before in our politics. Needless to say, we are in the abstract heartily at one with the Liberal news- papers in condemning the Government for holding the election under existing conditions. These conditions not only disfran- chise the majority of our soldiers and sailors. They foster and give scope to the political strategy of an Administration whose Chief commands a " corner " in the expression of public opinion through the Press, and has made the Fountain of Honour run into his particular Party cistern with a boldness never practised before on such a scale. But though we deplore the event, we are bound to point out that the wailing and complaining from Liberal newspapers inspires in us a feeling which would awaken the sense of irony, nay, of humour, if the matter were not so terribly serious. The truth is, the reckless, irresponsible, even cynical use that the Prime Minister is making of the chance which the end of the war has given him, shows in a most striking degree, to those who have eyes to see, the Nemesis of political partisanship. Mr. Lloyd George is only pushing a little further the policy of " Thorough " and of political cant combined with political ruthlessness which was adopted with the full approval of the Liberal organiza- tions and of the Liberal Press during the eight years and a half before the war in which the Liberal Party were in power. The spirit in which Mr. Lloyd George is conducting the present election was the spirit which informed the policy of the Liberal Party, though no doubt the earlier manifestation was some- what milder. Yet when it was exercised in the name and in the interests of the unbroken Party, it drew no protests from the organs which are now crying out so bitterly, but was sophistically defended and supported. Partisanship has come home to roost with a vengeance.
It is worth while to consider the matter a little more in detail, and to show how Mr. Lloyd George can find a precedent in the period between 1906 and August 1914, both for some of the specific acts against which the Liberal Press and the Liberal Leaders are now protesting, and for the spirit in which he is conducting his campaign. Take first the question of his ruthless exploitation of the system under which no checks have been left us against the manipulation of the electorate through the machinery of the Party organization. The Liberals when they destroyed the capacity of the House of Lords to insist upon the country being consulted in regard to measures upon which the will of the majority of the people was doubtful, provided no check on, or insurance against, the misuse of our electoral system. It is true that in the Preamble to the Parliament Act which destroyed the Second Chamber, the Liberals, under pressure from a man who was by personal character, instinct, and tradition disinclined to partisanship— namely, Sir Edward Grey—pledged themselves to give us a reformed and efficient Second House. This pledge was not only not kept, but no serious attempt was made to keep it. Therefore when the new Parliament meets, and if the majority of that new Parliament is pledged to give a blank cheque to the present Executive, as in all human probability it will be, there will be no body in the Constitution able to control the Prime Minister evetrin the slightest degree. We shall, in fact, have a ruler armed with the powers which under the Code of Justinian belonged to the Roman Emperor. " Quod principi plaeuit legis habet vigorem " (What pleases the Prince has the force of law).
The reason why no Second Chamber was provided in accordance with the pledge was, to be plain, because at the moment it suited the Liberal Party to have Single-Chamber Government. The same may be said of the way in which the Liberal Party treated all proposals for the check upon political partisanship that would be provided by Proportional Representation or the Referendum. If either, or both, of these plans had been ailopted, we should have made sure (which is what we mean by Democracy) that the will of the majority of the nation should prevail. But here again the Liberal Party listened to the specious pleas of political partisan- ship, and even up to the spring of this year, when they had the power to obtain it, refused to agree to Proportional Representation. It is idle to say that a great many Unionists were also opposed to Proportional Representation, because it is certain that if the Liberal Party had insisted on carrying out the benevolent recommendations of the Speaker's Com- mittee in this matter they could have had their way. It is also idle to say that the Alternative Vote would have done as well, because the Alternative Vote was in truth a scheme under which the Caucus was given a greater, not a lesser, power of manipUlating the electorate.
Take next the refusal of the Liberal Party to consult the country in regard to the Home Rule Act, as an alternative to the use of force for the coercion of Ulster. The proper way to coerce Ulster, granted that the Liberals honestly believed that Ulster ought to be coerced and placed under a Dublin Parliament, was to have sought an imperative mandate from the country. If the country had given such a mandate by returning a Liberal majority at an ad hoc election, the people of North-East Ulster, however unfairly treated and however bitter their feelings, must have yielded and all risks of bloodshed would have been avoided. But this just form of coercion the Liberals did not dare to propose because they knew they would not get a mandate at the polls. Accordingly they prepared to coerce by the use of physical force that part of Ireland in which the local majority passionately desired to remain in the United Kingdom. Mr. Winston Churchill was actually allowed to bring a portion of the Fleet to the Irish coast in order to overawe Belfast by a threat of bombardment. If bombard- ment was not contemplated, what was the use of sending powerful armed vessels into the waters of North-East Ireland ? With one voice the Liberal Party yelled that force was no remedy and that coercion was a crime. With the other they ordered the British warships to clear for action, in order to force the Six-County Area out of the United Kingdom. In brief, they preferred the risk, nay, the certainty, of bloodshed to asking the British people whether they agreed to a policy which, while giving Home Rule to that part of Ireland which desired it, forced. Home Rule upon that part which refused and detested it. We are all agreed in theory that in politics we should clear our minds of cant. The Liberal Party in dealing with the Irish problem not only forgot the injunction, but laid in a double supply of the vile intoxicant which most quickly debauches the moral consciousness. If things go as badly for the Liberals as they fear, and as we admit they have a right to fear, under a Lloyd George Administration inspired with the Party maxim Thorough," the incident of the ruthlessness of the Liberal policy in regard to Ulster will rise up against them in judgment.
A similar Nemesis must also arise in another matter in regard to which complaint is now loud, and properly loud, among Liberals—that is, against what we may call the Lloyd George spirit in Government; namely, the exaltation of political partisanship to such a point that it is made to cover all lapses, faults, and deficiencies in men who can produce certificates of Party loyalty from the Whips and the Party Leaders. Take the example of the Marconi scandal. We are not going to rake up the details of that scandal. We shall only touch upon the attitude of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Leaders in regard to it. It is admitted that Liberal Leaders like Mr. Asquith, Lord Grey of Fallodon, Mr. McKenna, and Lord Crewe, to name only four, would never have dreamt of action of the kind taken by the three Liberal Cabinet Ministers concerned. It is admitted also that the bulk of the Liberal Party were in their hearts pained beyond measure at what had taken place, and but for Party loyalty would have insisted upon grave Parliamentary censure, involving retirement from office, being passed upon those who had forgotten their duty. Yet because the Liberal Party was involved, and might have suffered by the condemnation of the delinquents, the Liberal Party—backed up solidly by the whole Liberal Press—con- sented to a whitewashing resolution. They in fact forced Parliament to declare that nothing had been done in the Marconi business that called for censure. Here indeed was the triumph of partisanship, and heavy is the Nemesis that has fallen on the Liberal Party. The same condemnation rests upon the Liberal Party when they now protest—and needless to say here also with entire agieement Irora us—against the reckless manner in which honours are sCattered.broadeast throughout the land, Ifor ser- vices-not to the nation but to Party, and especially for,services which take the form of large contributions to Party funds. It is notorious that the huge Liberal Party hoard—the hoard that Lord Murray of Elibank endeavoured to inorease by speculating with a portion of it in Marconi shares—which made the most lavish paymer.ts fcr candidates' expenses, and so for the production of the worst type of Party politician, the man who owed his seat and £400 a year to the bounty of the Whip, was mainly procured by the grant of Peerages and other honours. It became indeed a common- place among cynical financiers and other rich men anxious to be Peers or Baronets or Knights, or even Privy Councillors, that it was much easier to reach these positions if you were a nominal Liberal than a nominal Unionist. The quick road to honours lay in mouthing the Liberal Party shibboleths. For example, in spite of the generally held belief that Liberalism stood for Temperance and was the enemy of the traders in intoxicants, distillers, and sometimes we believe even brewers, found it easier to obtain their titles from the Liberal Party than from that usually derided as the Tied-Party of the Trade. Distillers and brewers and distributors of intoxicants might be denounced on Liberal platforms, but at the Whips' office Party officials were always ready to do business with the so-called " accursed commerce."
The regime of cant founded upon a calculated partisanship tended to corrupt every portion of the Liberal Party. Certainly the Liberal Press was not exempt from it. The chief caterers of the purest Liberalism were seen to possess a morning newspaper refounded and re-established in order to suppress gambling on the racecourse, and side by side with it an evening paper, not only engaged in furious incitements to betting, but making its large yearly income by turning its pages into a gambling board. The profits derived from the most efficient of gambling journals, the Star, went to feed the pious Daily News, which regarded gambling as a crime. Here indeed partisanship and cant had touched bottom and become a pure hypocrisy.
Finally, there is to be noted the danger which sober-minded people find in the fact that the Prime Minister has so poor a judgment in the matter of men that he allows himself to be surrounded by a coterie whom the better opinion of the country unquestionably regards as " Political Unde- sirables." Chief among these is Mr. Winston Churchill. No one can study his political career, his political methods, or his general attitude towards the great issues that affect 'the nation without regarding him as that most dangerous type of politician, the unscrupulous aristocratic demagogue. But Mr. Winston Churchill was the special pet of the Liberal Party. It was their chiefs who raised him to power and found apologies for every reckless and partisan action on his part. We are not going through the whole list of the " Political Undesirables " who surround Mr. Lloyd George, but we will mention one or two specimens. There is Sir Alfred Mond, the Jewish millionaire of German extraction and Radical, or if necessary Socialistic, views ; Mr. Sutherland, the Prime Minister's factotum, who, unless we are mistaken, is standing as a Liberal Coalition candidate; Sir Henry Dalziel, the controller of one of the most important sections of the Lloyd George Press Lord Reading, the man who, in spite of his unrivalled legal knowledge and great experience in financial and Stock Exchange affairs, recommended the purchase of American Marconi shares as desirable investments for a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and also is understood to have sug- gested the line of defence in the first Marconi debate by which the House of Commons and the public were deceived. We do not, however, wish to stir these depths, except to point out that it is an extraordinary example of the Nemesis of partisanship that the " Political Undesirables " we have named are all Liberals, all men, that is, who were brought into public life, and cherished and maintained there, by the Liberal Party. They may be suspect now in their old political haunts, but it was not so very long ago that the Spectator was denounced in Liberal newspapers as guilty of something almost equivalent to blasphemy or high treason because in the period before the war it protested against the exaltation of several of these whole-hearted supporters of Democracy and Liberal and popular principles, and suggested that Mr. Asquith and his colleagues, by insisting upon building upon a foundation of paradox, would some day bring upoa themselves the Nemesis which has now overtaken them.
Political opportunists of the " remainder " Liberal Party will no doubt ask us what good we are doing by thus raking up the Liberal past. " You profess," they will say, " to feel great anxiety at seeing Mr. Lloyd George placed in a position of supreme and unchecked power, such as he is likely- to attain at a General Election run 'under the conditions that prevail at the present moment, and yet in the same breath you discredit those who are trying to curb him. You ought to bury the hatchet—the Honours Price List, the Marconi Scrip and Staff, and the rest—and join us in dishing the man who has betrayed his most sacred Party obligations." Our answer is one which will, we are sure, command assent except among those who do not make a reasonable use of Party but regard it as a fetish. Considering the nature of statesmen and politicians, it is at the present juncture essential to point out that partisanship carried to the lengths to which the Liberal Party carried it during their term of office, and especially when it goes hand in hand with moral cant and camouflage of all sorts, is certain to bring forth such a harvest of weakness and humiliation as is now being reaped by.the Liberal Party. You cannot bring up a Party on the emascu- lating and demoralizing food upon which the Liberal Party were fed for eight years without that Party finding themselves ultimately in the position in which the Liberal Party now find themselves. Their organs complain of Mr. Lloyd George and of the way in which he employs and develops all the old machinery of Party, though his is nominally a non-party Administration, to secure the defeat, nay, the virtual annihilation, of his opponents. They forget that we owe Mr. Lloyd George, his political prestige and influence, and the political morality which he practises, entirely to the Liberal Party. They found him, reared him, and encouraged him, and as long as he was doing their work and gaining Party triumphs for them not a word was ever said in condemnation of his methods or of the spirit he introduced into our political system. If it is true, as we believe it is, that Parties, like nations, have the leaders they deserve, then emphatically the Liberal Party deserve Mr. Lloyd George and all that his new lease of power will mean for them.
For us, who are not Liberals, there is one consolation. In the future the more far-seeing Party politicians will, we believe, recognize that in politics it does not pay in the end to " take the bridle off," as they say in Texas, and that even in such a squalid affair as obtaining and keeping together a Party majority, moderation—the art of not pushing things to ex- tremes—is the safer and wiser plan. It is not only right and wise, but best in the most material sense, to trim the boat, even when it is only full of " political items." If a to guogue argument is used against us as Unionists we shall be unmoved. The Unionist Party are not free from blame, but they never pushed political partisanship and cant to the lengths they were pushed by the Liberals from 1906 to 1914, and never suffered the consequent demoralization now being endured by their 'opponents.
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