THE SHADOW OF THE MARCONI SCANDAL.
SUPPOSE an earnest Liberal worker in the country, a man of good faith and ordinary common-sense, but with not very much first-hand knowledge of politics or politicians. Let us suppose next that he is told (1) that the officials of a trading company directed by a body of well-known commercial capitalists have been in the habit of secretly giving " tips " and money allowances to public servants in order to secure contracts ; (2) that the men who took the bribes or semi-bribes were put on their trial and punished severely ; and (3) that the experienced Judge who tried the case very strongly censured the com- pany in question, and expressed the opinion that the directors were responsible because they must have been aware of what was going on. Finally, let us imagine this question put to our earnest Liberal : "In these circum- stances, which party in the State do you suppose would be more likely to shelter the capitalists and be against prosecuting them ? Which party would be likely to prove the rich man's friend, which party would be more incensed at what had taken place and less willing to make cynical and worldly-wise allowances for the bribers and corrupters, which party would uphold the moral ideal, and which would be likely to take a material and cynical view of the whole matter ? " Can it be doubted that in the supposed case our earnest and sincere Liberal would say at once that of course it would be the Liberal Party that would be anxious to prosecute and bring the wealthy capitalists to account and make them responsible for their acts, and not to let the punishment fall only on the small men while the big men went free ? He would probably add : " Naturally fon won't find the Tories punishing their own friends. They are the supporters and associates of the capitalists, they are the party of the rich and of the commercial classes, they have always been tainted with jobbery and making money out of the public purse, and unless the thing is very scandalous indeed you cannot expect them to bit their own people. Capitalists always stand by each other. With the Liberal Party it is very different. They are the party of justice and impartiality, and they would take a stern view in such a case, and insist that there shall not be one law for the rich and another for the poor. They, thank heaven ! are not under any obligations to the capitalists, but, as Mr. Lloyd George has shown again and again, will denounce the selfishness and want of public spirit in the rich without fear and without flinching. Besides, the Liberal tradition has always been one of purity in politics, and they have recognized that by jobbery and bribery the small man is robbed of his rights, and the rich man gains an ascend- ancy over him and over the affairs of State to which he is not entitled. Undoubtedly, then, in the case presumed it will be the Conservatives, as representatives of the upper classes, who will protect the capitalists, and not the Liberals. The Liberals will see that equal justice is done, that the rich have no advantage, and that the State gives no special protection to the millionaire."
No one, we think, will venture to deny that this is the kind of language one would expect to hear from a plain provincial Liberal unaccustomed to the inner working of the party system. Yet look at what has actually happened in the Canteens Case ! The small men and the poor men have been forced to stand in the dock and go through the terrible ordeal of a public exposure. But what have the Government done in the case of the company, and the directors who controlled the company, which gave douceure and " tips " to officers and officials in order that their con= tracts might be maintained ? It is true that the company has been struck off the list of War Office contractors, for, in view of what happened in the Courts, it would have been absolutely impossible to continue to treat it as a company which might expect Government favours.
No sign has been given, however, that the Government mean to prosecute the chairman and directors of the Board, or take any action against them, or mark their view of the terrible seriousness of the offence. They do not even ask Lord Saye and Sele to resign the post of honour and influence which he holds in the Ministry. It is true that Lord Saye and Sele bad nothing to do with Lipton's, was no party to the Canteens action, and that the reading of a letter from him was merely a side issue.
Can it be denied, nevertheless, that a Government really careful of the honour of the State, which took the line we have described as that of the earnest Liberal, would feel that, however sorry they might be for the individual, they must mark the need of a high standard of public duty by accepting, or calling for, his resignation ? Yet not only has nothing been done in the case of Lord Saye and Sele, but it is obvious that the Government mean to give him their full support. As for the directors, the Government, it is clear, have no intention of allow- ing the Public Prosecutor or the Treasury to take any action. In view of the Marconi case, which we shall have to refer to later, this unwillingness of the Govern- ment to act is no doubt explicable. What is inexplicable is that no private Liberal Member, except Sir Arthur Markham, who must, however, be counted as an independent rather than a normal Liberal, has taken the case up. After all, not even the most heated Unionist partisan will assert that the whole of the Liberal Party was implicated in the Marconi scandal, or that the shadow of that sinister case affects anything but a very minute proportion of the party. There are hundreds of Liberal Members who are not in the least afraid of any to guoquo argument in this matter.
Yet what do we see ? It is not a Liberal, but one whom, Liberals would consider a typical member of the capitalist class, a Peer and a rich man, and a man whose family and traditions are among the very oldest in the country, who first brings the case before Parliament. Lord Newton, to his infinite credit, raised the question in the House of Lords on Monday, July 6th. Here are his words, compiled from the reports in the Times and the Morning Post :— " Lord Newton, in asking his Majesty's Government whether Lipton (Limited) are still on the list of contractors to the War Office or to Army canteens, quoted the observations of the Judge who tried the case. I am bound to say,' said the Judge, the evidence before the Court satisfies me that these defendants employed by Lipton (Limited) were acting upon a system which was known to the directorate, encouraged by the directorate, and persisted in by the directorate, after they had given considera- tion as to whether to stop that system or not.' Almost identical views were expressed in the Court of Appeal. It must be perfectly plain, continued Lord Newton, to everybody that the employees of Lipton (Limited) were associated in a flagrant conspiracy with Government functionaries, and that large sums of money were annually expended in bribing those officials, money which, presumably, came out of the pockets of the share- holders. The head of this engaging enterprise—not the orna- mental head, but the chairman and managing director—was Sir Thomas Lipton, and, in view of the well-established facts, it might have been reasonably expected that some adverse comment on their proceedings would have appeared in the
Press, and that there would have been some condemnation expressed. On the contrary, they were invited daily, he might almost say hourly, to admire this gentleman as a sort of national hero, a magnificent sportsman of the true British type, a com- pendium of all the British and all the other Christian virtues, and he frequently saw it suggested that his transcendent merits could only be adequately recognized by making him a member of that House. He thought that in cases of corruption of this kind, when such facts bad been disclosed, nearly everybody enter- tained more or less the same feelings. He thought that impartial persons could not help sympathizing to a certain extent with the victims of a system of this kind. The temptation under which these men were placed under an organized system was almost irresistible to men of small means who were very inadequately paid. When they succumbed they fell irretrievably, and he did not think he had ever read any- thing more tragic than the case of the unfortunate officer who had been the victim of these temptations, and whose fall it was impossible to retrieve. He could not help thinking that the general feeling with regard to cases of this kind was that the real offenders escaped more or less unscathed. In a somewhat parallel case, which was in everybody's mind, he did not think anybody could help but be struck by the fact that an un- fortunate underling connected with the Post Office was sevarely punished for an offence which, in the case of more highly placed individuals, was described as a mere error of judgment. In the Lipton case it was quite clear that the moral, if not the technical, responsibility rested on the directors of this company. Those directors had not been punished at alL It was true that some of their employees had been fined, but he presumed that those fines, like the bribes, would eventually come out of the shareholders' pockets. What he desired to point out was that, unless all this talk about the prevention of corruption and so forth was mere humbug, it was obviously necessary that an example should be made in this case. He submitted that these people had not been adequately punished, and that there was an obvious way of punishing them. Lipton's might say that they had been unfortunate in having been found out, and that it was the practice of other firms as well as their own. That might be the case, but it seemed to him that these facts having been clearly proved, it was obviously desirable that some emphatic notice should bo taken of them, and that these people should be made an example of. If it was announced that in future the War Office and other bodies concerned would have nothing more to do with Lipton (Limited), he felt convinced that that decision would meet with greater approval from the public generally than many other actions with which the Government had recently been associated."
We regret to say that the reply which was made by Lord Lucas, who represents the War Office in the Lords, was altogether inadequate. Lipton's, he said, had not held any War Office contract since 1912. Their names had been removed from the list of firms eligible to hold War Office contracts, no new canteen contracts would in any circum- stances be entered into with them, and all contracts with canteens now held by them would be terminated as soon as possible. Not a word was said as to the possibility of any prosecution. In answer to Lord Robert Cecil on Tuesday, the Solicitor-General stated that the law officers had considered the case, and decided that there was no evidence which would justify further proceedings. That, we suppose, means that the Govern- ment would find a prosecution extremely embarrassing. The opinion of the Judge in such a matter is unquestion- ably better than that of the Solicitor-General. After all, why not leave the matter to a jury ? Even an unsuccess- ful prosecution would mark the fact that the Government are not possessed of the notion that it is only safe to bring underlings to book. No one wants to see vindictive prosecutions, but a law case is not a wager which it dis- graces the Treasury to lose. If there has clearly been wrongdoing, let the wrongdoer be put in the dock, and let the Judge and jury decide whether the evidence is or is not strong enough to justify a conviction. Why should the law officers regard the possibility of an unsuccessful prosecution with such terror ?
It might have been supposed that the first result of the official non possumus would have been an explosion of indig- nation in the Liberal Press. Not a bit of it. As far as we know, the Liberal newspapers have passed the matter over practically in silence. There is, however, we are glad to say, an exception—our contemporary the Nation. Though we regret that the Nation ultimately failed the country in the Marconi scandal, it has not been afraid to draw atten- tion to Lord Newton's speech. It is true it does not venture to call for a prosecution, lest, we suppose, it should too greatly embarrass the party, but, at any rate, it does let its readers know of Lord Newton's protest. No doubt the action of the Nation will be absolutely ignored by the Government, but at least it will be able to feel that it did not allow its voice to be altogether stifled by party considerations, and that in this particular it has not joined the ranks of the "organized hypocrisy." If we ended here we should probably be told by moderate men on both sides that we ought not to have left the matter without some attempt at an explanation of the action of the Liberals. " You cannot mean to suggest," it would be said, " that the Government deliberately intend to shield Sir Thomas Lipton and the directors of his company, or that they have any sinister personal reasons for not taking action." Our critics would be right. We do not mean to make any such suggestion. We do not believe that Sir Thomas Lipton and his colleagues have any bold over the. Government, or have taken any steps to induce them to protect the company. We will go further, and say that we have no doubt that the great bulk of the Cabinet would, if they dared, greatly prefer to mark their sense of indignation about what was disclosed in the Canteens Case. We believe that the explana- tion of their action is to be found in the blighting shadow of the Marconi Case. The Government feel that if they were to take the action recommended by Lord Newton, action which we venture to say has occurred to every honest man who has read the details of the trial as peremptorily required, they would lay themselves open to a retort which they would not know how to meet. How could they not only refuse to punish, but refuse even to express the slightest disapproval of, the persons who offered, and the Ministers who took, a Stock Exchange "tip "—money's-worth, if not actual money—derived in the last resort from those who controlled a company in contractual relations with the Government, and then take stern action against the Lipton directors ? The thing is impossible.
No doubt before the Marconi exposures the Govern- ment punished an unfortunate Post Office official for doing what, under a somewhat thin disguise, the three Ministers had done, but the impression created in the country was so unfortunate, and the explanation was so lame, that we do not wonder they did not care to repeat the experiment. " Conscience makes cowards of us all," and conscience has unquestionably made cowards of the Government in regard to all questions of dereliction of public duty in the matter of money. The shadow of the Marconi Case is over all their actions. They dare not take the line which, we feel quite sure, as men of honour and good public service they would like to take because they made the fatal error of yielding to the threat of Mr. Lloyd George that, if the Government allowed any censure, however slight, to be passed upon him and his errant colleagues by the House of Commons, he would break up the Ministry. The Government gave way and secured the solidarity of the Cabinet, but at a terrible price. They are now paying, and must continue to pay, the penalty of their moral cowardice. Because they did not dare to speak out, or let the House of Commons speak out, about the Marconi scandal, they now do not dare to do what they ought to do, and know they ought to do, in regard to the Lipton directors. They punished with terrible severity the ranker officer who, in his poverty, yielded to the temptations upon temptations forced upon him by Lipton's. But because of their action in the Marconi scandal they dare not touch the rich civilian offenders. They feel they would be reopening the Marconi Case, and rather than do this they evade a public duty, however imperative and however clear.
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