The Real Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald : An Authentic Life. By H.
WHETHER or not it was a wholesome feeling in the past that there should be no lives written of living men, that sentiment has dissolved. The trade of book-making has become so active, so feverish even, in its activities that it is impossible for anyone to attract attention—it may chance as a film star or some other kind of celebrity—without being made the subject of a volume. Already the Prime Minister has twice paid this penalty of fame, and now a third time he submits to the ordeal. " Submits " is evidently the word, for Mr. Tiltrnan's life is deseribed as " authentic," and he acknow.- ledges Mr. MacDcinald's courtesy " in placing at my dispokal much information otherwise unobtainable." What this information was it is difficult to guess, for the book consists mainly of passages from Mr. MacDonald's speeches, which could be culled from the columns of old newspapers.
Mrs. Hamilton's sketch of her chief, published under the oddly inappropriate pseudonym, " Iconoclast " (it was an act of worship rather than the breaking of an idol), dwelt largely on the personal side. Mr. Tiltman is the chronicler of Mr. MacDonald's public words and acts. Thus he reverts to the older method of biography, the Victorian method, not entirely ruling out analysis of temperament, description of character, but keeping these subordinate to the historical record. This is just as well, for Mr. Tiltman has clearly no close acquaintance with MacDonald the man. If he had, he would not speak of him as silent even for a Scot." Nor, if -he knew much about Highlanders, would he call them " reserved." It is the Prime Minister's Highland descent that gives him both his power of oratory and his gift of fluent delightful talk. And as it was his power of oratory that put him into a position to reach out for the first place in politics, it is valuable to glance through his orations over a period of some thirty years and to estimate from them what manner of politician he has been.
The outstanding merits of him are his honesty and his strong sense of moral responsibility. No one who reads these speeches can fail to discover in them the utterances of a man with a conscience, a conscience that he dares not palter with. He is a religious man because he lives in the conviction of " some power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." lie is not afraid to tell a crowd listening to a political argument : " The one thing that matters in this life is the spirit." He believes earnestly in God's programme of Creation '' being on the lines for which he is working, and recognizes the duty laid on him to co-operate. That is the force which lies behind his eloquence, as it lay behind Gladstone's and John Bright's. He is unlike them both, as they were unlike each other. But history will see that they had this in common. They were politicians, not for what they could get out of a political career —an income, the applause of multitudes, the illusion of power— but because they were driven on by an impulse which bade them do what they felt to be GOd's will. If the career of MacDonald seems more interesting, that is because it has been more variegated. Gladstone built up a party, the Liberal Party, to pass his measures, just as MacDonald built up the Labour Party. But Gladstone had been put into the House of Commons with everything in his favour. MacDonald had to struggle into ParliaMent with almost everything against him. Gladstone suffered for his Home Rule policy in much the same way as MacDonald suffered during the War but with this difference : the aristo- crat was pilloried by his class, the man of the people by the nation at large. To enter now into a discussion of MacDonald's attitude towards the War would be unprofitable and could lead no whither. Briefly he held that the War need not have happened, that it was an appalling disaster, that as we were in it we had to fight while it lasted but that it ought to be ended as quickly as possible by a peace of understanding, not of violence. Many would say : " Well, wasn't he right ? " Whatever we may think about that, it is clear that he believed 'fervently in his own rightness and behaved as he *did because
God helping him, he could do no other."
The British race rages like any other against those who venture to oppose themselves to its passions and prejudices. But it has this idiosyncrasy, found in scarcely any other stock, that afterwards it pays handsome tribute to the opposers' courage. That happened to Gladstone 'in the last years of his life ; it has happened to Ramsay MacDonald. And thiS volume will seem to most readers of it to pros;e that justice has been done. All through his career, from the days of envelope addressing and clerking in City office, in his tragically happy and too short marriage, in the years of shaping the Labour Party (for if the inspiration was surely heir Hardie's the hard work was no less certainly MacDonald's) ; as the abused of all abusers, then as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister, he has remained always in essentials the same man—a man who for all his imper- .fections,. his implacable enmities, his impatience, his vanity so easily scratched, has lived as in the sight of his Creator and has striven to do that Creator's will.
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