Lord Balfour BOOKS OF THE DAY
By J. A. SPENDER IN the closing chapters of the second volume of the biography of her uncle Mrs. Dugdale presents an altogether charming picture of him in his last years. We see him still sparkling with his old wit and gift of incisive expression, but mellowed by time, looking back charitably over the past and facing serenely the end of his earthly voyage. Is it fanciful for a Liberal reader to see emerging in him the old Liberal which slumbers somewhere in the breast of most Conservative British statesmen ? Bring him out et the doniesticItruggle and face hini with the rivalries and ambitions-of the gurOpean Powers, and he becomes, not in spite of himself but expressing his natural self, the exponent of the British Liberal idea. This is a story that is told of more than one Conservative statesman in British history, but it is told again with force and freshness in the closing chapters of this biography. We see Balfour in his mission to the United States and afterwards at the Washington Conference and again in working at the constitution of the British Commonwealth, doing this typically British business in a remarkably effective and distinguished way, and doing it to such purpose as to make us regret the more that his part at the Peace Conference was mainly that of modest self-suppression.
The early chapters of this volume are devoted to the Parlia- mentary struggles on the questions of the House of Lords and Home Rule in the years before the War. Balfour was not exempt from the passion of self-justification which possesses so many eminent men, and his niece reports him as having claimed towards the. end of his life that -- everything, every- thing, remained " of his Irish policy in the 'eighties -and 'nineties of the last century. This is a hard saying. One would have thought there must have been moments when a philosophic elder statesman would have regretted the lost opportunities of settling the Irish question on the basis of
Parliamentary -Home Rule. . •
Balfour had a considerable reputation-.as a thinker, but when we come to the history of these years it is difficult to discover what philosophy lay behind his Conservatism, or what theory he held of Parliamentary Government. It appears that the rumour which credited him at the time with having wrecked the various efforts at accommodation on the Education Bill- of 1902 was well-founded. He was actuated, his. niece tells us, by a sincere attachment to his own Education Act of 1900. That is intelligible as a personal preference, but if the winning of an election by the immense majority which the Liberals obtained in 1906 was not to be followed by any consequences in legislation, how was-the Parliamentary system to go on ? This was the question which was asked piore and more insistently as the Conservative leaders used the House of Lords to destroy the programme—by no means a revolu- tionary one—which the Liberal party had placed before the electors in 1906. What was the use of a Liberal party if it could not to this extent make its will prevail ? How could Parliament work in a democratic country if a Conservative minority could thus nullify the victory of its OPponents ?
The climax came when the House of Lords stepped out of its ground tndefeat the Budget of-1909. Possibly Bpdfour could not have prevented it ; he seems to have been caught in the toils between die-hard landowners and tariff-reformers, but most subsequent conservative opinion has judged it to have been a disastrous mistake. The extra taxation was only £14,000,000, just the sum which a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer gave away in a post-War Budget to cheapen the glass of beer. The land taxes could have been repealed when the Conservative party won an election, as they professed Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour (1906-1930). By his niece, Blanche E. C. Dugdale (Mrs. Edgar Dugdale).
Vol. II, (Hutchinson, 18a.) .
themselves confident of doing in the following ,year. The Liberal party was bound to take up this challenge and carry it through to the Parliament Act of 1911, for the alternative was its own ruin, and the establishment in literal fact of the House of Lords as the " upper House." How was it that so, acute and philosophical a brain as Balfour's failed to see the inevitable sequence, inevitable if British constitutional theory had any validity ? He was shabbily treated by his party in 1911, but such a succession bf disasters demanded a scapegoat, and the more illustrious the scapegoat, the less mercifully he is treated.
After reading this volume I find myself more than ever in the mist about the overture for a Coalition which Mr. Lloyd George made to Balfour during the constitutional Crisis in 1910, but there is the same atmosphere about all the relatiOns of these two remarkable men in the later years. Bid-. tour's attitude seems to have been that of the intellectual to the: elemental—the intellectual fascinated by qualities which he Was conscious of not possessing himself. Instead of storming and protesting, as Curzon did at the incursions of the Prime, Minister into his department, .fie seemed, if one may put it so, to think the Prime Minister great fun. From first to last he appears. to have been true to his original idea that Mr. Lloyd George must not be crossed. There were advantages • in having him and advantages in not having hiin, but none in having him and trying to correct him. In the break-up' of 1922 he behaved as a loyal and generous colleague, but Mrs. Dugdale does not tell us what future he foresaw, if • the Coalition had survived and gone to the country under . Mr. Lloyd George's leadership.
• To the already copious material for the history of the crisis. Of December, 1916, in 'which 'Asquith was displaced,' Mrs. Dugdale makes the surprising addition that on Sunday:. December 3rd, when Balfour was away ill, he had " already Made up his mind to back Mr. Lloyd George by every means' in his power." I own I find it very difficult to believe this.' For at that moment Asquith was defending him " by everyi-, Means in his power " against Mr. Lloyd George's desire to.! remove him from the Admiralty, and on the following day ' Balfour himself tendered his resignation to Asquith on the'. express ground that he knew himself to be unacceptable to' Mr. Lloyd George and that " attempts to compel co-Opeieation between Lloyd George and felloW-workers with iwhom=he is in imperfect sympathy will only produce fresh trouble."' Asquith naturally interpreted This as a quiiiotic atterrpt to help him in his difficulties with Mr. Lloyd George, and on' that supposition strongly urged Balfour to rema7n. Several- eminent people seem to have made up their minds that it. was legitimate and patriotic to lay any sort of trap for- Asquith on this occasion, but it strains credulity to suppose that the writer of the letters to. Asquith printed on the following pages of this volume had before writing them made up his mind to back Mr. Lloyd George by every . means_ at his command." If that was his mind on Sunday, December 3rd, it would have saved .a world of misunder- : standing and appearance of duplicity. for him, to have said . sp straightforwardly to Asquith and to his Unionist col-,` leagues, both of whom were equally in the dark. Mrs.. Dugdale frequently deplores the faultiness of her uncle's, - memorY, in dealing with the past, and I would suggest that:. his version of his own state of mind on December 3rd was ' an afterthought which does him less than justice. Another instance of Balfour's lapses of memory is his comment on Grey. He takes Grey to task for not warning • dermaity that if she attacked France, England would come in. This is eimetly,what_Grey did, from the-first ..:eteel. that e was:•Flgrigir-Seeeeiary 'tight Ani '.tb the end:'
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