Mr Balfour's Poodle(25)

The famous speeches which the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered at Newcastle-on-Tyne during the week-end of October 9-11 were therefore designed to inject the maximum amount of heat into the already torrid controversy, and to make it as difficult as possible for the union  ists to retreat from the dangerously exposed positions they had already taken up.

‘They are forcing revolution,’ he said. ‘But the Lords may decree a revolution which the people will direct. If they begin, issues will be raised that they little dream of, questions will be asked which are now whispered in humble voices, and answers will be demanded then with authority. The question will be asked “Should 500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment—the deliberate judgment—of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?” That is one question. Another will be, who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth; who is it—who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labour, to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when at the end of his days he claims at the hands of the community he served a poor pension of eightpence a day, he can only get it through a revolution; and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his neighbour receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose finger inscribed it? These are the questions that will be asked. The answers are charged with peril for the order of things the Peers represent; but they are fraught with rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude who have been treading the dusty road along which the people have marched through the dark ages which are now emerging into the light.’e

It was a wonderful popular oratory, with enough weight of content—an explosively radical content too—for there to be no question of dismissing it as mere froth. Some of the imagery might be a little lurid for fastidious tastes—Lord Knollys begged the Prime Minister ‘not to pretend to the King that he liked Mr. Lloyd George’s speeches, for the King would not believe it, and it only irritated him’—but it was not intended for fastidious people. It was intended to rouse the mass support of the Liberal Party and to goad the peers into a rash truculence. Towards both these ends it was extremely conducive, although by October the former was more necessary than the latter.

The final decision was taken by the union  ist Party by November 10, a week after the Finance Bill had left the Commons, when Lansdowne gave notice that on second reading he would move ‘that this House is not justified in giving its assent to the Bill until it has been submitted to the judgment of the country’. The motion was most carefully drafted, by Balfour and others, so as to present the intervention of the House of Lords in the most popular light possible. To this end it was as well-conceived as any motion could be, but the awareness of danger which this reveals makes it only more surprising that such an experienced party as the union  ist Party, under such experienced leaders as Balfour and Lansdowne, should ever have decided upon a course so reckless as a peers’ rejection of a Budget. Their action did not kill the Budget, it greatly improved the electoral prospects of the Liberal Government, and it made the destruction of the Lords’ veto inevitable; and all these consequences could have been predicted by any intelligent observer, and were predicted by many people. Why did the union  ist leadership ever agree to such a course?

It was not through lack of good advice. On the purely constitutional and legal plane they were not perhaps very well served, for, of the leading authorities, the union  ists, Anson and Dicey, by declaring that rejection would be perfectly proper (in sharp conflict with the Liberal, Pollock, who declared that it would be most improper), showed themselves to be no more objective than most men. But there were plenty of sage union  ist politicians to point out the foolishness of the course which was being taken. The old Duke of Devonshire, who would undoubtedly have exercised a strong influence on the side of caution, had died in 1908, and Lord Goschen,1 who would have been on the same side, had predeceased him by a year.2 Nevertheless there was still Lord James of Hereford, Lord St. Aldwyn, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh, all of them former members of union  ist Cabinets and all of them most unhappy at the thought of a peers’ rejection.

‘If we are to do anything,’ St. Aldwyn wrote to Lansdowne on September 8, discussing a possible compromise policy of amendment, ‘this seems to me a reasonable course; but I own that my House of Commons feeling on finance is against it, and that I think both the right and the wise course is to pass the Budget as it comes to us.’f Lord James and Lord Balfour were, if anything, even more strongly opposed to action by the Lords, and they were supported in this view by Lord Cromer and Lord Lytton. The last, in particular, argued very powerfully that rejection would be not so much wrong as catastrophically foolish.