MR. CHURCHILL'S MISFIRE. T HE temporary suspension of the sittings of
the House of Commons does not justify neglect of the political problems which will probably assert themselves with ever- increasing force during the remainder of the life of the present Parliament. Before the House rose the country was given a sample of the kind of question which is certain always to be with us. The formation of the Coalition Ministry has left a number of formerly prominent politicians out of the limelight ; they are anxious to get back into the glare again. Foremost among them is Mr. Winston Churchill, and his actions and ambitions are peculiarly dangerous because for some unknown reason he appears to possess a certain backing within the Cabinet. Without this backing his recent per- formances would have been absolutely impossible. He makes so many manoeuvres that it is not easy to remember them all, but the public will probably recollect that he resigned his seat in the Coalition Cabinet, of which he had then been a member for five months, on the ground that he was not included in the small War Council which was then being formed. He expounded this reason very fully in a public letter ad- dressed to the Prime Minister and dated November 11th, 1915. After explaining that he felt it impossible to accept " a general responsibility for war A.,olicy without any effective share in its guidance or control," be went on to say : " I therefore ask you to submit my resignation to the King. I am an officer, and I place myself unreservedly at the disposal of the military authorities, observing that my regiment is in France."
This passage in Mr. Churchill's letter of resignation is what a Frenchman would call a beau geste. A politician, unable to serve his country in the Council Chamber, determines to serve her in the trenches ; he places himself unreservedly at the disposal of the military authorities. Yet, curiously enough, within a very few months Mr. Churchill found his way back to the House of Commons, and proceeded to make some bitter speeches criticizing his previous colleaaues. In one of these speeches he startled the House by suggesting that his old enemy Lord Fisher should be recalled to the Admiralty. The suggestion was intended to be a proof of Mr. Churchill's magnanimity, but unkind, though possibly quite unfounded, rumour said that it was the outcome of a lunch party with certain Radical politicians who had assured Mr. Churchill— or Colonel Churchill as he then was—that the Fisher card was the best card to play. After this little excursion he returned again to the trenches, or at any rate to some place in France, the public meanwhile wondering why an officer was allowed to run backwards and forwards between the House of Commons and the front. After a few more weeks of service with the Army Colonel Churchill apparently got tired of that career, and, by various processes which we do not clearly under- stand, divested himself, or was at his own suggestion divested entirely of his military position and military rank and became once more plain Mr. Churchill the politician.
Of all the phases in Mr. Churchill's career, there has been none which has produced so widespread a feeling of public indignation. Especially strong is this feeling among the masses to whom he now, apparently, wants to make a peculiar appeal. There is nothing that democracy so much hates as unfair privilege, and Mr. Churchill has enjoyed and has utilized an unfair privilege in getting himself in and out of the Army at his arbitrary will. The five million men, of whom most have boined the Army voluntarily, are none of them free thus to go ackwards and forwards between military and civil life. They, officers and men alike, have to obey orders ; they cannot with rhetorical gesture boast of placing themselves unre- servedly at the disposal of the military authorities, and then skip back to their old occupation. Even if Colonel Churchill's infantry unit collapsed under him owing to drafting difficulties and to the regiment having too many battalions, there was nothing to prevent his applying for the command of another unit.
In this old occupation of his Mr. Churchill tried a new move just before the Parliamentary Recess began. A section of the Socialist Party has scented in the high prices of food a useful. political cry. Doubtless from their point of view the bry is a fairly good one. It appeals to large masses of people, and it gives a convenient handle for the propagation of Socialist theories with regard to the control of industry by the State. It struck Mr. Churchill, or struck the friends from whom he takes advice, that here was a card which he also might play. He played it, and, if we may change the simile, the only result was a misfire. Indeed, it would be little exaggeration to say that the chances of success of this Socialist campaign against high food prices, whatever they were so long as the campaign remained in purely Socialist hands, vanished the moment it was taken up by Mr. Churchill. Directly he made a speech identifying himself with the outcry against dear food and with the demand for Government intervention, the whole country realized that a game was being played for the purpose of discrediting the Government and bringing Mr. Churchill back to popularity.
On its merits the proposal that the Government should i regulate food prices is about as foolish a proposal as any responsible man could make. Even in a country, if any there be, which is entirely self-supporting, the regulation of food prices by the Government presents most extraordinary difficulties. The Germans, who are much more nearly self- supporting in the matter of food than ourselves, have realized some of those difficulties in practice. There has been much waste of foodstuffs, there has been much waste of labour in regulating the distribution of food, and an almost incon- ceivable amount of personal inconvenience imposed on the masses of the population. To imagine that the people of England or Scotland would tolerate for a moment the system, to which the Germans have to submit, of bread tickets and meat tickets and long queues waiting outside the shops is to confess to an absolute incapacity to measure the temperament of one's countrymen. Of course, if we were living in as absolute state of siege, we should have to submit to this inconvenience, and to the practical miseries that would accompany it ; but it is ridiculous to suggest that Great Britain is in a state of siege. The vast majority of the popula- tion is probably better fed to-day than at any time in our history. The people who are suffering from the high prices of food are a small minority, and the only scientific way of approaching the problem is to ask how that minority can best be helped. This, however, would not suit the book of the Socialist Party. They want to do something for their own people, the people who supply them with funds and with votes. Most of these people are getting good wages, and their wages have already been raised on account of war prices. But they demand a still further rise all round, not only for the benefit of the really poorly paid workers, who are hit by high prices, but also for the benefit of the well-paid worker, who ought to be, and we are sure in the vast majority of cases is, perfectly willing to bear his share of the burdens of the war. 1.11 the case of the railway workers, as we wrote some time ago, the poorly paid man has a grievance which ought to be con- sidered on its merits, without regard to the bargain which was made last autumn ; but the well-paid railway worker has no case at all. He is asking in effect for a subsidy out of the revenues of the State in order to relieve him of a burden which falls upon all classes of the community. By a curious con- fusion of ideas, the organizers of this railway agitation make it a grievance that the State in taking over the railways guaranteed to the shareholders their previous dividends, forgetting that these shareholders have to pay for bread and butcher's meat just as much as the railway workers have to pay for these essentials of life, and that the shareholders, many of them on the same financial level as artisans, receive no compensation in the way of increased dividends to meet the increased cost of living.
This is a sample of the methods of Mr. Churchill's new political companions. They are not methods which are likely to shock his sense of political straightforwardness. But if he imagines that his latest manoeuvre will help him to recover the esteem of the mass of his countrymen, or of any appreciable section of his countrymen, he is grossly mistaken. The public now fully understands that his influence on our political life is almost wholly bad because it is wholly dissociated from any motive except that of personal advancement. He would, indeed, now be powerless either for good or for evil, were it not for the fact—or what appears to be the fact—that he still retains useful friends within the Cabinet who afford to him privileges which are denied to the ordinary man. Whatever be the motive of this political favouritism, it is bitterly resented by the masses of the people who have no friends in high places. The only excuse we can find for the action of the Cabinet is that it demonstrates an idyllic simplicity of character. Apparently Cabinet Ministers have never heard of the countryman and the adder.
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