The election campaign was generally agreed to have been a dull one. ‘The general election (of December, 1910),’ wrote Sir Sidney Low in the Fortnightly for January, 1911, ‘was the most apathetic within living memory.’ The issues were inevitably rather stale, although Home Rule played a larger part than in January, and the electorate was bored with being asked to vote again so quickly. Over one in six, indeed, of those who had previously voted declined to do so, and the total poll fell by more than a million votes. There were some shafts of interest, however. Lloyd George turned with vigour from the moderation of his coalition proposals to the immoderation of his platform manner, and at Mile End, at the beginning of the campaign, he gave what was almost a second edition of his Limehouse speech. He described the Lords (according, it may be thought, an unduly ancient lineage to most members of the peerage) as ‘descended partly from plunderers who came over with William the Conqueror and partly from plunderers of the poor at the Reformation’, and contrasted their good fortune with that of a man he had seen in Dartmoor who, he claimed, had been sentenced to thirteen years’ penal servitude for stealing 2s. from a church box when drunk. ‘An aristocracy,’ he added, ‘is like cheese; the older it is the higher it becomes.’y
In this speech Lloyd George also delivered a riposte to a union ist line of attack which was given great prominence throughout the campaign. Redmond and three other Nationalist members had spent the recess touring Canada and the United States and collecting dollars for the Home Rule cause. A very respectable list of subscribers, including the name of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian Prime Minister of the day, gave them a total of £ 40,000. But the respectability of its sources did not prevent the union ist press from denouncing the menace of this dollar fund. Even Balfour joined in the attack, when, in his Nottingham speech of November 17, he announced that ‘the Government were going to destroy the constitution at the will of American subscribers’. The issue showed every sign of developing into the major Tory stunt of the campaign. Lloyd George attacked it as such, and related it to the other ‘bogeys’ which the union ists had created for previous elections. ‘But since when,’ he asked, ‘has the British aristocracy despised American dollars? They have underpinned many a tottering noble house.’ It was an effective thrust, sufficiently so at any rate to provoke the Duke of Marlborough,1 who, the Annual Register assures us,z had entertained the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Blenheim, ‘publicly to denounce his reference to American heiresses’.
In their different ways the Liberal leaders pursued the campaign. Mr. Churchill began firmly by writing a public letter to the chairman of his election committee announcing that ‘The Liberals had long claimed equal political rights. They were now going to take them.’aa But he then missed a great opportunity by declining Bonar Law’s offer that they should fight each other in North-West Manchester (where Mr. Churchill had been defeated at a bye-election in 1908, but which had again become Liberal at the first 1910 general election), the loser to remain out of the next Parliament. The seat stayed in Liberal hands. Sir Edward Grey argued strongly against the referendum—‘a pig in a poke’—and Lord Morley broke a Nestorian silence to ridicule ‘the appeal to moderate men by a union ist Party which had destroyed the House of Lords and were destroying the parliamentary system’.bb
To a greater extent than at the previous election, however, Asquith dominated the Government campaign. From his Hull speech on November 25, with its famous and sustained satire of the peers’ sudden eagerness to reform themselves,1 through to the end he rained a series of hammer blows on to the Opposition case. ‘He spoke in all parts of the country,’ his biographers tell us, ‘expounding with rare force and dignity what he believed to be the true constitutional doctrine, employing raillery and satire, when they served his purpose, but most carefully refraining from all violence of language and mob-oratory.’cc
On the union ist side the chief excitement was provided by Balfour’s partial retreat from tariff reform. As soon as the election became imminent he was strongly urged by some supporters of his party to do this.
‘The editor of the Express, Buckle,1 Norton-Griffiths,2 M.P. for Wednesbury, some others, and Garvin—Garvin of all men!’ Austen Chamberlain wrote on November 13, ‘… had all been in quick succession to tell Balfour that we could not win with the food duties, that he must —not indeed abandon them altogether—but announce that if returned to power now he would not impose any new food duty without yet annother appeal to the country.’dd