Mr Balfour's Poodle(30)

Throughout the campaign Lloyd George remained in strong oratorical form. He joined eagerly in a ‘war scare’ with Germany2 argument which Balfour introduced, and told a Peckham audience on January 7 that ‘the believers in inevitable war are the men who make them. The union  ists, after having destroyed the Constitution, are prepared to destroy the fiscal system and to risk war with a European power, and all just to avoid valuation of their land.’d And he kept up his rhetorical pressure to the last moment, even to the extent of addressing a large meeting at Grimsby on the day of the poll, an intervention which was commonly thought to have had much to do with the Liberal gain which was achieved there. His visit incensed the local union  ists to the extent of making him repeat, in a less dramatic and ingenious form, his Birmingham escape of ten years earlier.1

The election campaign generally was in no way outstandingly exciting—even the suffragettes called off their attempts to break up meetings after Christmas—although public interest remained high throughout. Inevitably, the attention of the voters strayed from the rather involved constitutional point at issue, and the Budget versus tariff reform was probably the main question upon which electors in Great Britain made up their minds. In other words, the union  ists got what they wanted: an election on the merits of the Budget rather than on the propriety of the peers’ behaviour. In Ireland, of course, the position was entirely different. The Budget itself would have won very few votes, but it had come to possess the contingent merit of opening up a way by which the veto might be destroyed; and to this end, which they knew to be a necessary step towards Home Rule, the bulk of the Nationalists were prepared to swallow the Budget and give close support to the Liberal Party. A minority of the Nationalists, however, rejected such a policy of compromise, and nine members, who had accepted Redmond’s leadership in the last Parliament, fought and were elected under the label of ‘Independent Nationalists’.

The earlier part of the campaign was notable for the platform activity of the peers. Hitherto the regular sessional order of the House of Commons declaring that no member of the other House should concern himself in parliamentary elections had been fairly strictly observed, even when, as in 1880, it put the union  ists at a grave disadvantage by precluding their three leading figures1 from participation in the campaign. In the 1906 Parliament an apparent breach had occurred when the Duke of Norfolk wrote a public letter of support to the union  ist candidate in the High Peak bye-election,2 and the fact that the Committee of Privileges, to which the matter was referred, recommended no action may have encouraged peers to apply the rule more loosely at the general election than had before been the practice. Many of them decided that to participate fully up to the day on which the writs were issued, and then to abstain, would be a fair compromise.3

Until January 10, therefore, there was a spate of senatorial oratory from union  ist platforms. Whether it helped the cause it was designed to promote is doubtful. Mr. R. C. K. Ensor has commented that ‘it had in some cases the disadvantage which the act permitting a prisoner to give evidence is generally allowed to have entailed for the prisoner’.e Lord Cawdor and Lord Curzon were perhaps the most vehemently immoderate of spokesmen in their own defence. Cawdor combined his vehemence with an engagingly demagogic approach, as when, at Leeds on December 18, he accused the Government of ‘wanting us to copy Bulgaria and Greece in getting rid of a Second Chamber, and Nigeria in its land law’.f Curzon was very different, and it is difficult now to imagine the reaction of his audience at Oldham on December 16 to his denunciation of the House of Commons for containing ‘no great generals or ex-Colonial Governors’, and his revelation that ‘Renan had said that all civilization had been the work of aristocracies,1 and Maine that a democracy in England would have prevented the Reformation and a series of other great political and economic reforms’.g

In Birmingham they were less concerned with proclaiming the merits of aristocracy, a theme which would still have been uncongenial to both the leaders and the supporters of the Chamberlain faction, than with turning everything to the advantage of the cause of tariff reform. Joseph Chamberlain, who was again candidate for West Birmingham, was unable to leave the Kensington house where he had remained, incapacitated by a stroke, since 1906, but he poured out letters of encouragement to chosen candidates; and Austen, operating from Highbury and fighting East Worcestershire, was a willing if not altogether effective substitute. The tariff reform cause undoubtedly made some progress during this campaign,2 within the ranks of union  ist workers and outside, and Balfour, on the eve of the first day’s polling, both made it the principal subject of his last-minute message to the electors and joined with Joseph Chamberlain in signing a categorical denial that protection would affect the working-class cost of living.