Sleepy Dog Startled
By IAIN HAMILTON S a political historian Mr. Roy Jenkins is not at all partisan. In the preface to his closely documented account* of the struggle between the Liberals and the Peers which began with the radical landslide of 1906 and ended on a hot evening in the House of Lords five years later, he disclaims any intention of drawing parallels or proving a thesis. He is Simply an intelligent and able young man looking with the Inmost curiosity into that Indian summer when the old order bad its last fling. But he must, considering both his own natural sYmpathies as a socialist and the nature of his narrative, be allowed to raise his eyebrows from time to time (he does no more), and he is not to be grudged the pleasure he must have taken in the title he chose. "The House of Lords is not the Watchdog of the Constitution," said Lloyd George not long before he shot off, in the People's Budget, the signal for the battle to be joined in earnest; " it is Mr. Balfour's poodle." And so indeed in some sense it was, until it got a sort of hydrophobia, turned in disgust from the cool waters of reason, and d . shed its well-bred characteristics. Then it became a different and more uncouth sort of beast. For it was very much the sleeping dog when the Tories were in power, and the most controversial measures could go roaring and lurching past unscathed. It was another matter when the Liberals were in power. Then it raised its head and snapped its old jaws to some effect. Lloyd George was the first to make a good joke about the custom, but it had not gone unnoticed before. This flagrantly one-sided interpretation of their duty by the Tory Peers had become something like mystic dogma by 1906, and 1i'llen'Balfour observed during an election speech at Notting- „am that it was everyone's duty to see that ” the great Unionist rarty should still control, whether in power or whether in gave them, some Liberals found it hard to believe that the peers would lightly flout the will of the country as expressed so decisively, but even as they doubted so were Balfour and Lansdowne laying their plans " to secure that the party in the two Houses shall not work as two separate armies, but shall co-operate in a common plan of campaign."
The Liberal Administration struggled on lamely in the midst of the obstacles set out .by the upper and lower divisions of the Opposition. In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman retired, soon after to die, and Asquith went to Biarritz to kiss hands. His power of command was shortly to be exercised in full. Again and again the tiny Opposition displayed its wholly dispropor- tionate strength. if the Government were to assert itself it would have to do so drastically, and one way open was to use the Finance Bill, by constitutional convention protected from the peers' attentions, for purposes wider than the raising of revenue. It is at this point that Lloyd George comes whistling into the story with his ungentlemanly techniques. Mr. Jenkins calls into question the assumption that he deliberately framed the People's Budget of 1909 to provoke the Lords into rash action and so to create popular support for the Government in a fight to draw, the poodle's teeth. However that may be, and there are obscurities here, it is certain that if he had had no other aim he could scarcely have been more successful.
when Asquith spoke more plainly, the King's conscience, ably supported by Lord Knollys, won the day, and he gave his reluctant consent.
The Government, thus fOrtified, in the last days of 1910 won its third successive general election, and the scene was set, for the final act in the constitutional drama. Balfour saw that he was beaten, but Lansdowne, his general in the Lords, at first did not. The Parliament Bill was pushed through the Commons against 900 amendments and its final blessing was bestowed by Mr. Churchill, for all that he was " aghast at the Government's moderation." (No wonder the Tories have always kept a chilly corner of their mind swept for their hero.) The rest of the story is familiar and beyond a doubt destructive of the arguments, which still persist, that the Lords were more concerned with the safety of the Constitution than with their own partisan feelings. Mr. Balfour's poodle ran wild in its diehard frenzy until neither he nor Lansdowne could bring it to heel. The wildest of the ditchers ' were ready—or so they liked to pretend —for armed resistance. In a stifling atmosphere of bitterness and suppressed violence the crucial division approached, and no one knew what the result might be ; Morley provided (or was provided with) the formula confirming the King's readiness to call a new lordly army into being ; and, happily for the peerage, the diehards were betrayed by the ignoble band, clerical and lay, of Unionist traitors' (the Observer), by 'the Bishops and the Rats' (George Wyndham).
So ended the story which Mr. Jenkins re-tells with lucidity and economy and an admirable restraint. And it ended in the nick of time, for Agadir had replaced 'The Political Crisis' as the subject for first leaders. Rougher beasts than English radicalism were slouching to be born, and from the havoc which they were to cry into being, entirely new forms of thought were to emerge into a completely changed climate. Events bore out the Spectator's prophecy that "till the Parliament Bill is passed the Government is founded upon a rock. The moment it passes that rock it becomes a sandbank." The House of Lords survived the storms and survives
still, secure in the essential deadlock between right and left over its reform, and it remains for many an acceptable refuge.
There is room for new creations In that upper place of bliss as Mr. Jenkins puts it. He is to be congratulated not only on the beguiling narration of exciting events, but on such unobtrusively urbane gestures as his selection of photographs. The dead personae of the old drama come briskly to life, and, in a remarkable photo- graph of Lansdowne and Rosebery, unflatteringly. What an age ago it all seems 1 It is only with some effort that those as young as the author of this book or its reviewer can imaginatively comprehend that these are figures of the recent, not the incredibly remote, past. So changes the weather. So sleeps the poodle. Long may it lie.
Previous page
