The Reign of George V

By R. C. K. ENSOR

THE occasion of a Silver Jubilee can justify more than one book on the King's reign. Mr. Buchan's* is not quite the first

in the field, but it may well hold its place there, since it

has style, maturity and _character, besides that sort of neat bookmanship which you- would expect from an author of his experience. The recent news of his appointment to be Governor-General of Canada. does not seem quite irrelevant

to it. For his attempt to see the King's reign from the King's standpoint has helped him to cultivate a breadth of non-party judgement not at all usual in a Conservative M.P., though extremely appropriate to a Governor-General.

The difficulty about handling the reign historically is that it coincides with no epoch. Instead it laps over three of them—or bits of three. The four years and a quarter before the War were crowded with events of great moment, but they form no unity in themselves, and you must go back at least as far as 1906 in order to get one. Then comes the War, a period distinct enough, but where British history almost loses itself for the time 1n international; and where, moreover, the demand for a historical summary, long or short, is already met on different seE 1 as by half a dozen excellent books. Lastly there is the stretch of post-War years—much over three-fifths of the whole reign, but starting chains of events to which no end is visible at the present moment, though the conclusions of stages or sub-periods may be dated at 1924 and 1929. The crux of all is how to treat the War. You have either to skip it, or else, if you make it interesting, it must almost infallibly loom too large in a small book. That is what has happened here. Mr.

Buchan has treated the War with special skill ; he has subjected narrative and comments to intense compression without destroying their life ; but in the end they eat up two-fifths of his volume; which is altogether too much. •

The distinction of his sketch as a whole is that, while it is on a moderate scale, does not cite authorities, and is aimed at popular readers, it is yet far from covering most of its ground in a superficial or perfunctory manner. On the contrary, there is an abundance of thought in it, and a series of independent judgements on events and men, which you may not always agree with, but are not to be dismissed as trivial. They reveal a cross-bench type of mind, and are seldom, if ever, swayed by party bias, though influenced, one fancies, at some salient points by personal attachments. Towards politicians he is in general pretty impartial. He shows frank fondness for Asquith and for Lord Carson ; is cooler about Bonar Law ; tries his best to bring out the many sides of Mr. Lloyd George ; does unwavering justice to Lord Haldane and Lord Milner ; and is alive to the vitality of Mr. Churchill: Here is his conunent on the Asquith Coalition of 1915. It

"brought- into the Cabinet Conservatives like Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Austen Chamberlain, and Mr. Bonar Law, and a representative of Labour in Mr. Arthur Henderson. One grotesque result was that Mr. Churchill, who was like a panther among polar bears, was relegated to the lowest Cabinet post, and Lord Haldane, the Army's creator, was left out altogether.'

"Polar bears ! " What an admirably succinct comment the- word passes upon the list preceding it ! But in general this

is not a history of politicians—perhaps not enough so. Thus, the names of Mr. Baldwin and Mr. MacDonald only occur once each—as heads of the Ministries of 1923 and 1981 respectively.; _ and those of men so important within the King's reign as

Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Smillie, Mr. McKenna and Lord Birkenhead, do not occur at all.. No attempt is made to trace, how it was that the Liberal party broke up and disappeared, * The King's Grace : 1910-1935. By John Buchan. (Hodder and Stoughton. 5s.) nor how the Labour party gained strength to step into its place ; yet assuredly to the future historian of 1918-1935i

these will not seem unimportant things. "

In his sketch of the years before -the War Mr. Buchan perhaps reads into them, here and there, too Much after- history. Thus he makes the Lloyd George Budget of 1909 a scheme to tax the rich to defray the cost of social services. It was not that ; its money motive, which brought about the heavy Death Duties (as distinct from its political motive, which brought about the unremunerative land taxes so as to irritate the House of Lords into fighting on Unfavourable ground), was to pay for a big programme of super-Dread- noughts. That is the more worth recording exactly, because, interestingly enough, both the previous sets of Death Duties—. Goschen's in 1889 and Harcourt's in 1894—were also motived by naval building-programmes. As a matter of fact, the costs of social services, as we know them today, are, as regards' the overwhelming bulk of them, post-War ; and did not enter the calculations of pre-War statesmanship at all.

The pre-War drama of Home Rule and Ulster is handled here on the whole very well. Mr. Buchan is perhaps over- tender to what may be thought the least happy initiative of the Unionist party leaders—their attempt in 1913 to drag the King into the squabble by publicly urging that it was his duty arbitrarily to dismiss the Asquith Ministry, as William IV dismissed Melbourne. Much water has since flowed under Europe's bridges ; and one would have thought it fairly obvious, that, if King George had yielded to that pressure then, he would not now be sitting on his throne., Happily he was far too wise to do it ; but that does not . exonerate the men who placed him in a hard dilemma. Least of all can they be excused by pleading the legal authority of Dicey and Anson, both of whom, though they had been great law-teachers in their prime, were in their old age and on the Irish issue grown palpably into faction-blinded pedants. However we are given here the pith of Asquith's statement upon it ; which seemed pretty unanswerable at the time, and to most people, who have thought about the Constitution,: will seem even more so today.

Mr. Buchan raises the question : What would have hap- pened about the Civil War in 1914, if the European War ' had not come in front of it ? He answers, that there would. have been no Civil War ; and surely he is right. The Irish were extraordinarily blind ; and Redmond in particular,' though he must have seen himself that the more Ulster counties were excluded, the sooner he was likely to get a - united Ireland by consent, could not act on his vision, because Sinn Fein were treading on his party's heels. But the dispute over the boundaries of the area to be excluded had been narrowed to so small a difference, that it is not conceivable Englishmen would have fought over it.

In the post-War section we encounter Ireland again—this time in a chapter on "The Changing Empire." Here, after sketching the birth and growth of the Free State and its present renewed conflict with Great Britain, Mr. Buchan' suggests that what is really dangerous is the difficulty of- getting the British 'public to think any longer that Ireland' matters. It is a pregnant opinion, and worth reflecting on. In regard to the British Conunonwealth as a whole, he brings out the increased personal responsibility that has fallen on the King and the Royal Family, since the Statute of West- minster left the Monarch as the sole formal link between the Mother Country and the Dominions. He pays a well-deserved tribute to the devoted way in which both King George and-' the Prince of Wales have tried to rise to the need.