MR. CH U liCELILL'S METHOD.
MR. WINSTON Ca UltCHILL has a most useful part to play, and he is admirably fitted to play it. A Government like Mr. Asquith's, with such a financial policy as they have thought proper to adopt, are in need of two qualities difficult, indeed impossible, to combine in one and the same Minister. They have to defend their financial policy on grounds which shall not alienate everybody who has anything to lose. They must recommend it by oratory which shall appeal to everybody who has anything to gain. Mr. Asquith, Mr. Haldane, Sir Edward Grey discharge the first of these functions with great success. Again and again proposals which seem to be framed in direct violation of every principle of sound finance have been so softened in Ministerial speeches, or so modified in Ministerial amend- ments, that Liberals who began by thinking that this time they really would have to vote against their party at the General Election have come in the end to think that perhaps the Budget is not so very bad after all,—at all events not bad enough to force them to give their vote to a Tariff Reformer. This process has been gone through several times this Session, and has for the most part achieved the desired result,—the sense that the Government are not so black as they are painted. But valuable as this result is for the sober members of the party, it has a very different effect on the enthusiastic politicians who form the staple of the attendance at mass meetings. It is no use to recommend the Budget to these audiences by the plea that it is gradually being given a shape which will not be quite intolerable. They are not interested in demonstrations that financiers whose moderation no one disputes have had their proposals attacked on substantially the same grounds, and that measures of which we can now see the benefit were denounced in their day as revolu- tionary. What is wanted here is a. speaker who will explain to them that these reassuring speeches are only meant to soothe a few timid Liberals who shudder when they hear the policy of their own party set out in plain language. They are but infants frightened at shadows, but they have votes, and it can do no harm to lead them gently up to the object which has alarmed them and let them see that their kindly nurse is not in the least afraid of it. The best method of doing this is to show that when the infants in question are out of the way the tempestuous oratory in which the Budget has from time to time been commended to the hearts and brains of the people is as stormy as ever ; that every revolu- tionary principle which the Prime Minister or his more responsible colleagues have seemed to soften or half withdraw still holds unchallenged possession,—in fact, that there is no deception about the Budget. It is the same simple measure of spoliation which its enemies have declared, and its friends denied, that it is. There is danger in the air. The more moderate members of the Cabinet have gone about their business only too successfully. What is wanted now is a Minister who knows nothing of qualifying explanations or softening restatements, but stands ready to make his own all the most violent speeches that have been delivered in praise of the Government Bill, and thus keep the rank-and-file of the party united, enthusiastic—and not too inquisitive about Ministerial intentions.
Here is Mr. Churchill's opportunity, and no one better knows how to make use of it. The theory of Cabinet responsibility in favour with the Government does not require that a Minister shall make his own retractations. All that is expected of him is that he shall not mind their being made for him. We do not in the least expect to see the remarkable theory of the function of the tax-gatherer which Mr. Churchill evolved at Leicester last Saturday formally adopted by the Government. They will benefit by it, and they will not be so ungrateful as to repudiate it after it has served its purpose, unless circumstances should make such a course necessary. In that case, we may be pretty sure that some Opposition speaker will by and by be recommended to take " my right honourable friend's " speech as a whole, and not be content with singling out a particular passage. Or he will be bidden to look in that ever-useful region, "the context," for a sufficient explana- tion of what has puzzled him. Or even, if the apologetic Minister finds himself very much in a corner, he will be invited to compare different versions of the passage in question, and asked, perhaps, whether he himself has always found reporters infallible. These are expedients that present no difficulties to old Parliamentary hands.
And, after all, what does it matter whether the explanation is accepted or not ? The political world is divided into two classes : those who believe in Mr. Churchill and those who do not. The former are quite pleased with what they have heard. They have taken their ideas of the Budget from his speech, and they are satisfied that it is all that he says it is and will do all that he says it will do. The great value of Mr. Churchill, from the point of view of his special audiences, is that he is never incon- sistent. His position in the Cabinet does not require him to keep two faces under his political hood. Mr. Lloyd George can make speeches quite as violent as those of Mr. Churchill, but then he has to make other speeches of an opposite type. He cannot always be Mr. Lloyd George ; he has from time to time to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has his platform manner, but he must also keep a House of Commons manner to be used on occasion. About Mr. Winston Churchill, on the contrary, there is a pervading unity which begets entire confidence. The admiring listener is not alienated by any interval of hard, brutal logic, or any sudden pause that indicates a momentary wonder in the speaker whetler he is tailing sense or nonsense. Which de- scription Mr. Churchill bestows on his own eloquence we will not presume to say, though it is hard to avoid the suspicion that no one so clever as he is can have any real doubt upon this point. But those whom he addresses feel no doubt of his wisdom, and if they are satisfied, he has fulfilled the whole end and purpose of his Ministerial being. They will go away in the firm conviction that alike in design and in execution the Budget they have heard expounded is the Budget that will shortly become law. They will be un- deceived some day ; but by that time they will be shouting some other cry equally popular and equally meaningless with that which fills their throats to-day ; or if their memories should be inconveniently retentive, and the contrast between Mr. Churchill's promise and Mr. Churchill's performance not have quite escaped them— well, by that time the Election will be over, and Mr. Churchill perhaps provided with another constituency. And if the worst should happen, and the orator of Saturday have to reconcile before the same audience the difference between the Budget be promised and the Budget the Government ultimately gave, he can but take a lesson from his colleagues and throw over them, as they in the interval will no doubt have thrown over him.
However this may be, to Mr. Churchill must be accorded the honour of giving a mew meaning to the -papers which the tax-gatherer so regularly leaves with us. That prosaic person will no longer content himself with the question : " How much have you got ? " Henceforward he will be - animated by a nobler purpose. What he will want to know will be, " How did you get it ? " There is enough in this change to giveEnglish Radicals an Unmeasurable superiority over the most advanced of the Frenchmen who call them- selves by the same name. In France it is still thought an argument against an Income-tax that it is inquisitorial. , We in England shall soon have left this stage, of our financial progress far in the rear., "Don't tell me what you have got," the tax-gatherer will say when he calls to explain the real significance of the new demand-note ; " tell me rather of the contemptible expedients, of the grinding, . squeezing, blending processes, ministering but to your own gain and inflicting only misery on all in whose neigh- bourhood you have lived or with whose business you have concerned yourself, in which your ignoble life has been spent." The financial inquisitor will blow nothing of . such superseded doctrines as that a man must not be made . to criminate himself. " Out of thine own mouth will I convict thee, thou wicked servant," will in future be the mode of address adopted by the hitherto inoffensive official who till now has thought his work done when he has left a blue envelope at your door containing an intimation that he is at home on Wednesdays, or, if more convenient, is accessible through the post. Possibly these personal . applications will not be retained under the new financial system, and the terrific array of interrogatories which Mr. Churchill enumerated only represent the several blsnk spaces that the vicious taxpayer will have to fill up with the humiliating particulars of the degrading means by which he has got together the money he misuses. If Mr. Churchill put any faith in the picture he draws of human nature, at least of human nature when it is in possession of any property, he would not, we feel sure, remain a moment longer in political life. He would have at once to found a new Order of preaching friars, bound by the solitary vow never to desist while life is left them from denouncing those who have gained their money by "processes which have done no good to any one, but only harm,"—by " squeezing and bleeding " the owners of businesses which they have not had the capacity to found, by denying the land which industry requires except at an extortionate price, by "squatting" on agricultural land till they have been bought out at fifty times its agricultural value, by sucking mining royalties from the toil of others instead of themselves drawing the metal from the bowels of the earth, by turning annual licenses into freeholds, and so robbing the State of the monopoly value. It is a terrible catalogue, but with the Budget passed the Government will make short work of these criminals. Mr. Churchill has improved upon Proudhon. The dictum that " property is robbery " might have an inconvenient application to Ministers who happen to possess it. That the property of landowners, of brewers, of the owners of businesses bought not made, of those who own mines but stay above-ground themselves,—that the property of all these is robbery is a much more com- fortable doctrine, and one that has few terrors for the judicious investor. He has only to study the Leicester speech and put a black mark opposite the securities against which Mr. Churchill's eloquence was hurled.
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