Mr Balfour's Poodle(44)

Balfour was also anxious to be reasonable. He always saw the other side’s case with a dangerous ease. He was just as eager as Asquith not to impede the work of the conference by provocative outside speeches.1 He sought to narrow the differences, and on the day of the failure of the conference he inspired the Prime Minister to write of his attitude in the following terms: ‘We all agree that A.J.B. is head and shoulders above his colleagues. I had a rather intimate talk with him before the conference this morning. He is very pessimistic about the future, and evidently sees nothing for himself but chagrin and a possible private life.’p

Yet, despite his ‘head and shoulders’ superiority, Balfour did not dominate the union  ist side of the conference. It was Lansdowne who filled this role. He was indefatigable in analysing proposals and putting his views upon them on paper, and it is not merely due to the greater thoroughness of his biographer2 that his attitude during the conference is known to us in much greater detail than is that of Balfour.

Lansdowne’s dominance did not assist agreement. He was throughout both stubborn and pessimistic. As early as the end of July he was writing ‘supposing … that per impossible we were to arrive at an agreement’,q and by September he was still more resolved on failure. Mr. Ensor is almost certainly right in attributing Lansdowne’s negative approach to the fact that ‘his interest in tariff reform remained tepid (while) his views about Ireland remained narrowly obstinate, being those of a Southern Irish landlord who had never forgotten the Land League’.r Many others in the union  ist Party would have been prepared to agree to some form of federal Home Rule in order to clear the decks for tariff reform. Such views were put forward in the Observer by J. L. Garvin,1 in a series of letters to The Times by Austen Chamberlain’s friend F. S. Oliver,2 and by Alfred Lyttelton3 in private correspondence with Balfour. F. E. Smith gave characteristically sweeping expression to them when he wrote, in a letter, ‘Nor does it seem to me logical to submit the tremendous domestic problems of the future to joint session and reserve federal Home Rule—a dead quarrel for which neither the country nor the party cares a damn outside of Ulster and Liverpool.’s Austen Chamberlain, who was the recipient of this letter, did not dissent greatly from its views and was even more at one with those of Garvin and Oliver. He was able to discover that his father had been in favour of federal devolution before Mr. Gladstone’s ‘mischievous and destructive scheme’, and that was good enough for him.

Lansdowne was uninfluenced. He had been stubbornly obscurantist on Ireland in 1880 when he was a young man, and he remained so in 1910 when he was an old man. He was throughout quite prepared to see the conference fail rather than agree to a solution which would make easier any form of Home Rule. Cawdor supported him, and Austen Chamberlain, while markedly more moderate on a number of points, was not at his strongest on a complicated constitutional issue and put up little resistance. Indeed, when the end was near and the King was appealing for forbearance on both sides, Austen wrote with some truculence that ‘we cannot sacrifice the constitution in the vain hope of sparing the Throne’.t

The remaining member of the conference whose views were distinct and of the highest importance was Lloyd George. It might be thought that he, like Austen Chamberlain in this respect if in so few others, would not have dominated on detailed constitutional points. Mrs. Asquith records that when, at the conclusion of the conference, a complicated state paper was drawn up by the Cabinet and presented to the King, she asked her husband which of his colleagues had contributed most. After being assured that ‘all Winston’s suggestions had been discounted’, she asked ‘What aboutv X–––?’ (and the identity of ‘X’ in Mrs. Asquith’s memoirs is never in doubt), and was answered that ‘it was not his “genre” as he was useless upon paper’.u But all the sources of information of what passed at the conference itself go to show that Lloyd George played a vital role. He was in the centre of the stage and so full of fertile suggestions that union  ist memoranda for, and recollections of, the conference refer continually to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s proposals or to Mr. Lloyd George’s objections. But mainly to the former, for there can be no doubt that throughout this period he was desperately anxious to reach a compromise with the Opposition. ‘That the Chancellor of the Exchequer was sincerely desirous of an agreement he (Austen Chamberlain never doubted,’ Sir Charles Petrie wrotev immediately after recording Austen’s more doubtful view of Asquith on this point.