MR. CHURCHILL AT BIRMINGHAM.
FOR brazen political impudence, for flagrant paradox, for unblushing sophistry, Mr. Winston Churchill's speech at Birmingham on Wednesday would be hard to beat. We say nothing of his attack upon the Birmingham Liberal Unionists. That is a question of good taste which we prefer to leave untouched. We shall deal rather with the " moral exaltation," described by Mr. Churchill as absolutely necessary to victory, with which the speech overflows. Here are some of the chief non sequiturs which resulted from that mood. The Government, he declared, has the confidence of the country, and could, if it chose, easily win a General Election. "There was no reason why a General Election, at a well-chosen moment, and upon some clear, broad, simple issue, should not retrieve and restore the whole situation." As for by-elections, they mattered not a straw. The Government would not be deflected one hair's-breadth from its course by them. "We have our work to do, and while we have the power to carry it forward, we have no right, even if we had the inclination, to leave it uncompleted. CertainlY we shall not be so foolish, or play so false to those vsh° have supported us, as to fight on any ground but that of
our own choosing, or at any' time but that most advantageous to the general interest of the progressive cause." In a word, Mr. Churchill falls into the exact attitude of the bully who says :—" Why, I could knock your beastly head off if I liked. But let me tell you plainly that no power on earth will induce me to dream of demeaning myself by laying a finger upon you. I wouldn't lower myself by such an action. You couldn't get me to do it even if you paid me. So there! "
Next follows a wordy attack upon the House of Lords for daring to impede Liberal legislation. In destroying the Education Bill of 1906 the House of Lords, we are told, "asserted its right to resist the opinion of a majority of Members of the House of Commons fresh from election upon a subject which had been one of theinost prominent issues of the election." In rejecting the Licensing Bill of 1908 they paraded "their utter unconcern for the moral welfare of the mass of their fellow-countrymen." The House of Lords, he went on to point out, could not even be trusted to act on its own principles, for it had not rejected the Pensions Bill, the Miners' light Hours Bill, and the Trade Disputes Bill. " It is not possible for reasonable men to defend such a system or such an institution" :— "Counter-checks upon a democratic Assembly there may be, Perhaps there should be. But those counter-checks should be in the nature of delay, and not in the nature of arrest; they should operate evenly and equally against both political parties, and not against only one of them ; and above all they should be counter- checks conceived and employed in the national interest and not in a partisan interest. Those abuses and absurdities have now reached a point when it is certain that reform, effective and far- reaching, must be the necessary issue at a General Election; and, Whatever may be the result of that Election, be sure of this, that no Liberal Government will at any future time assume office without securing guarantees that that reform shall be carried out."
After reading this passage, we shall not, we trust, be accused of representing Mr. Churchill unfairly if we say that its effect is to suggest.that the House of Lords has so hampered the action of the Liberal Government, and so greatly impeded the exercise of the popular will, that it must be swept away. In fact, it has shown that its existence is incompatible with the carrying out of reform. Yet the very next passage of Mr. Churchill's Speech, if it means anything, means that the House of Lords has been powerless to prevent the Liberal Govern- tnent having its way, for has not that Government the most ulagnificent record for reform P "Whoa a Government is impotent, when it is destitute of ideas and. devoid of the Power to give effect to them, when it is brought to a complete arrest Upon the vital and essential lines of its Policy," then, he tells us, the sooner it divests itself of responsibilities which it cannot discharge, the better for the country and the party. But no one, he goes on, who looks back over the three busy years of legislation just completed can find any grounds for such a view of the position. The statute-book proves that the Liberal Qovernment has not laboured in vain '" No one can say that we have been powerless in the past. The 4,1(10-Unionist as he surveys the progress of his organisation, the miner as the cage brings him to the surface of the ground, the aged pensioner when lie visits the post-office with his cheque- 00k, the Irish Catholic whose son sees the ranges of a University Flareer thrown open, the child who is protected in his home and in Fie street, the peasant who desires to acquire a share of the soil 'le tills, the youthful offender in the prison, the citizen as he 1;akes his seat on the county Bench, the servant who is injured in II,oatestic service,—all give the lie to that, all can bear witness to no workings of a tireless social and humanitarian activity which, aireeted by knowledge and backed by power, tends steadily to Ill aka our country a better place for the many, without at the
aame time making it a bad place for the few."
tu other words, the Government has a splendid legislative le,eord. But if this is so, then it must surely follow that ;it'll House of Lords has proved incapable of hampering "e Liberal Government. Why, then, has it deserved the I€ ally of death ?
The House of Lords has flouted the will of the people in such vital matters as education and licensing. No one can say that the Government has been devoid of the power to give effect to its ideas.
Therefore the power of the House of Lords to interfere with legislation is overwhelming, and it must be swept away ! Was ever so monstrous a non aequitur paraded before an audience of reasonable men P But perhaps Mr. Winston Churchill will say that we have failed to note that he desires the abolition of the House of Lords, not because of the past, but because he is afraid. of what it may do in the future. He asks us : " If we have been powerful in the past, shall we then be powerless in the future P " If this is his line of defence, all we can say is that we are confident that what the country will say will be :—" Let us judge the future when it comes. If you make out that you have done so very well in the past in spite of the Lords, why are we to assume that you will not be able to do well in the future, especially as you toll us that we shall see before many months are past whether his Majesty's Government, and the House of Commons by which it is supported, do not still possess effective means to secure substantial results, not only upon those important political issues in which we have been for the time being thwarted, but also in that still wider and more important field. of social organisation into which, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, we shall now proceed to advance 'P You can't have it bath ways. If the Liberal Government can do so well in spite of the Lords, why arc you always worrying about them P " The operative part of Mr. Churchill's speech was reached. in the passage in which he dared the House of Lords to force a Dissolution on the Budget. He does not, he tells us, ignore the fact that the House of Lords has the power, though not the Constitutional right, to bring the government of the country to a standstill by rejecting the provision which the Commons make for the financial service of the year. " If they want a speedy Dissolution, they know where to find it." For his part, he would be quite content to see the battle joined
"upon the plain, simple issue of aristocratic rule against repre- sentative government, between the reversion to Protection and the maintenance of Free-trade, between a tax on bread and a tax on—well, never mind. And if they do not choose, or do not dare, to use the powers they most injuriously possess, if fear, I say, or tactics, or prudence, or some lingering sense of Constitutional decency, restrains them, then for heaven's sake lot us hoar no more of these taunts that we, the Liberal Party, are afraid to go to the country, that we do not possess its confidence, and that we are impotent to give effect to the essential purposes of our policy."
Upon this piece of turgid bravado we have only one thing to say. We must wait till we see the Budget. If the Budget is unjust, or if, in the opinion of sound financiers, it is likely to injure the prosperity of the country, then we trust most sincerely that the House of Lords will have the courage to throw it out. To discuss, however, financial projects that we have not seen, and shall not see for more than three months, would not be a very useful or practical proceeding.
Before we leave Mr. Churchill's speech we may notice the passage with which it closes, in which he describes the home policy of the Government. He tells us that the fortunate people in Britain are more happy than any other equally numerous class have been in the whole history of the world, but that " the left-out millions " are more miserable. "Our vanguard enjoys all the delights of all the ages. Our reargnard straggles out into conditions which are crueller than barbarism. The unemployed. artisan, the casual labourer, and the casual labourer's wife and children, the sweated worker, the infirm worker, the worker's widow, the underfed child, the untrained, undis- ciplined, aild exploited boy-labourer,—it is upon these subjects that our minds should dwell in the early days of 1909." That there is a good deal of rhetorical exaggeration in Mr. Churchill's description of "the left-out millious" will be obvious to all whose minds are not bemused by party claptrap. At the same time, we fully admit that the con- dition of these " left-out millions " must fill all patriotic and all humane men with concern and anxiety. We admit also that by far the most important question of politics at the moment is how to better the condition of those whom Mr. John Bright called the residuum. No efforts and no sacrifices can possibly be too great as long as they are conducive to improving the condition of the people. Upon that all men who are not sunk in selfishness or sloth must be agreed. But it is easy enough to put the problem. The question is how to solve it. In setting about a solution the first thing to do is to take care that we do not make matters worse by injudicious efforts at improvement.
In our opinion, the greater part of the miseries and evils connected with the unemployed artisan, the casual labourer, the casual labourer's wife and children, the sweated worker, the infirm worker, the worker's widow, the underfed child, and the untrained and exploited boy are directly attributable to unwise legislation in the past, and to the fact that we have taught men to rely upon the necessarily blundering and ineffectual efforts of the State to provide for them rather than on their own efforts. The evils just described are evils due to the waste, the improvidence, the impotence, and the want of indepen- dence fostered by the attempt to make the State a universal Providence. The notion that a man need not trouble about the future either of himself or his children because, in the words of the old pauper song, "the parish is bound to maintain us," has, alas ! sunk deep into the nature of the submerged tenth, and has largely defeated all efforts to raise them. Men and women who feel about themselves, in the words of the able-bodied pauper, " they'll never let 'ee starve," and also that they need have no anxiety about teaching their children a trade or arranging for their future because the State will see to it that no great harm will come from their carelessness and improvidence, are the victims, not of capitalism or of class oppression, but of a wrong-headed, demoralising, and pauperising social system. Mr. Churchill and his friends think they are going to cure the social hydrophobia, not merely by swallowing a hair of the dog that has bitten us, but by bolting the entire animal. It is not by such means that we look to remedy those evils, but rather by insisting that the greatest of national assets, economic as well as moral and political, is character. But you cannot have character without independence, and without making people realise that a man is his own star, and that only through the formation of character can a man find the road to happiness and prosperity.
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