The Proud Tower (12 page)

Only Lord Salisbury remained unimpressed. “He has not persuaded himself that he has any convictions,” he had written to Balfour in 1886, “and therein lies Gladstone’s infinite superiority.” Balfour, characteristically, was kinder but plain. “Joe, though we all love him dearly,” he wrote to Lady Elcho, “somehow does not absolutely or completely mix, does not form a chemical combination with us.” This was not surprising. Chamberlain had not been to public school or the University (that is, Oxford or Cambridge), where, as Lord Esher remarked, “everyone with his capacity learns self-restraint,” and was not even a member of the Church of England. He nevertheless moved suavely among his new associates and was seen entertaining to tea on the terrace of the House of Commons a large party that included three duchesses. He could certainly never be accused like Balfour of being too indifferent. Chamberlain was always in the grip of one passionate conviction or another which he would pursue, while he held it, with ruthless intensity. But he lacked a permanent, rooted point of view. Though only five years younger than Salisbury and twelve years older than Balfour, he represented the forces and methods of a new time to which Salisbury’s Government was essentially opposed. “The difference between Joe and me,” said Balfour, “is the difference between youth and age: I am age.” Balfour had behind him the long stability of belonging on top; Joe was the new tycoon in a hurry. The ways in which they did not “mix” were fundamental.

For the present the collaboration between Chamberlain and his new colleagues was mutually loyal. When his hand was suspected behind the Jameson Raid and the Liberals made furious accusations, the Government closed ranks around him and a parliamentary committee of investigation found itself unable to trace anything definite back to the Colonial Office. Joe emerged with power undiminished and aggressiveness undimmed. “I don’t know which of our many enemies we ought to defy,” he wrote to Salisbury after the Kruger telegram, “but let us defy someone.” As the minister in charge of the increasingly inimical negotiations with the Boer Republic, his favorite method, reported Balfour to Salisbury, “is the free application of irritants.” While these were taking effect an old defeat was avenged: in 1898 Kitchener retook Khartoum and raised the British flag over the grave of General Gordon. Farther up the Nile, at Fashoda, a French military expedition penetrating the Sudan was confronted eye to eye by the British and, after a period of suspense during which the French recognized realities, withdrew without the firing of a shot. Britain’s unpopularity rose with her prestige.

Then came the Boer War. The British Army, on which years of splendid isolation had conferred a certain rigidity, was revealed fully prepared for the Crimean War and it met a series of defeats. The Boers, it turned out, possessed cannon from Krupp’s and Creusot and their gunners were often German or French. President Kruger had used the reparations awarded for the Jameson Raid to buy artillery, Maxim guns and large stores of rifles and ammunition in preparation for the ultimate clash of arms. In one “Black Week” of December, 1899, Lord Methuen was defeated at Magersfontein, General Gatacre at Stormberg, and Sir Redvers Buller, the Commander-in-Chief, at Colenso with the loss of eleven guns, leaving Kimberley and Ladysmith invested. At home, people were stunned with unbelief. The Duke of Argyll, who was in his last illness, never rallied from the shock and died murmuring Tennyson’s line on the Duke of Wellington, “Who never lost an English gun.”

With Black Week went the last time Britons felt themselves unquestionably masters of the earth. And the point was brought home when the Kaiser, a few months later, was able to insist successfully on a German commander for the expedition embarking to punish the Boxers at Peking. True, it was a largely German effort, the main British force being already on the spot, but Salisbury objected on principle. It was a British characteristic, even if unreasonable, he told the German Ambassador, “not to endure the command of a foreigner.” But he could not afford at that moment to court a conflict which might result in help for the Boers and was forced to acquiesce.

In the new year, with new vigor, reinforcements and a new commander-in-chief to replace the disastrous Buller, the war gradually came under control. Mafeking was relieved in May, 1900—to the accompaniment of hysterics at home—Lord Roberts entered Pretoria in June and the annexation of the Transvaal was proclaimed on September 1 in the belief that only mopping-up was left. On a wave of renewed self-confidence and good spirits, the Conservatives called for a renewed mandate in what was known as the “Khaki” election in October. Using the slogan, “Every seat won by the Liberals is a seat won by the Boers,” they were comfortably returned to office. But though patriotic fervor was dominant, there was a current of antipathy to the war which came not only from “Little Englanders” of the orthodox Gladstone tradition but more particularly, this time, from an uneasy sense of ignoble motive, a glitter of the gold mines of the Rand, an aura of predatory capitalism, commercialism and profit. Opposition to the war provided a cause in which a young M.P., David Lloyd George, made himself known, although he did not go so far as to oppose annexation but only to propose negotiation to stop the war.

There were many inside and outside the Government who awaited the approaching Twentieth Century with certain illusions lost which were never to be restored. Lady Salisbury, shortly before she died in November, 1899, said to a young relative, “The young generation may criticize us as they like; will they ever provide anything as good as what we have known?”

The year 1900, rather than 1899, the Astronomer Royal had decided, after much weighing of the pros and cons, was the hundredth and last year of the Nineteenth Century. The moment of its passing was at hand; the end of the most hope-filled, change-filled, progressive, busiest and richest century the world had even known. Three weeks after it closed, on January 24, 1901, Queen Victoria died, redoubling the general sense of an era’s end. Lord Salisbury, tired of office, wanted to go too, but felt he could not until victory, still elusive in South Africa, was won. It came finally in June, 1902, and on July 14 Lord Salisbury stepped down. Again was felt the somber consciousness of something coming to an end: an Authority, a type, a tradition had departed. A French paper,
Le Temps
of Paris, still smarting from the humiliation of Fashoda, said, “What closes today with Lord Salisbury’s departure is a whole historic era. It is ironic that what he hands on is a democratized, imperialized, colonialized and vulgarized England—everything that is antithetic to the Toryism, the aristocratic tradition and the High Church that he stood for. It is the England of Mr. Chamberlain, not, despite his nominal leadership, of Mr. Balfour.”

Queen Victoria, Lord Salisbury and the Nineteenth Century were gone. A year before she died, the Queen, returning on her yacht from a visit to Ireland, was disturbed by rough seas. After a particularly strong wave buffeted the ship, she summoned her doctor, who was in attendance, and said, in unconscious echo of a distant predecessor, “Go up at once, Sir James, and give the Admiral my compliments and tell him the thing must not occur again.”

But the waves would not stand still.

2
The Idea and the Deed
THE ANARCHISTS: 1890–1914

2
The Idea and the Deed

S
O ENCHANTING WAS
the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea.

No single individual was the hero of the movement that swallowed up these lives. The Idea was its hero. It was, as a historian of revolt has called it, “a daydream of desperate romantics.” It had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity. It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act. These became the assassins. Between the two groups there was no contact. The thinkers in press and pamphlet constructed marvelous paper models of the Anarchist millennium; poured out tirades of hate and invective upon the ruling class and its despised ally, the bourgeoisie; issued trumpet calls for action, for a “propaganda of the deed” to accomplish the enemy’s overthrow. Whom were they calling? What deed were they asking for? They did not say precisely. Unknown to them, down in the lower depths of society lonely men were listening. They heard echoes of the tirades and the trumpets and caught a glimpse of the shining millennium that promised a life without hunger and without a boss. Suddenly one of them, with a sense of injury or a sense of mission, would rise up, go out and kill—and sacrifice his own life on the altar of the Idea.

They came from the warrens of the poor, where hunger and dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boiling cabbage and stale beer, where babies wailed and couples screamed in sudden quarrels, where roofs leaked and unmended windows let in the cold blasts of winter, where privacy was unimaginable, where men, women, grandparents and children lived together, eating, sleeping, fornicating, defecating, sickening and dying in one room, where a teakettle served as a wash boiler between meals, old boxes served as chairs, heaps of foul straw as beds, and boards propped across two crates as tables, where sometimes not all the children in a family could go out at one time because there were not enough clothes to go round, where decent families lived among drunkards, wife-beaters, thieves and prostitutes, where life was a seesaw of unemployment and endless toil, where a cigar-maker and his wife earning 13 cents an hour worked seventeen hours a day seven days a week to support themselves and three children, where death was the only exit and the only extravagance and the scraped savings of a lifetime would be squandered on a funeral coach with flowers and a parade of mourners to ensure against the anonymity and last ignominy of Potter’s Field.

The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The role of the State would be replaced by voluntary cooperation among individuals and the role of the law by the supreme law of the general welfare. To this end no reform of existing social evils through vote or persuasion was of any use, for the ruling class would never give up its property or the powers and laws which protected ownership of property. Therefore, the necessity of violence. Only revolutionary overturn of the entire malignant existing system would accomplish the desired result. Once the old structure was in rubble, a new social order of utter equality and no authority, with enough of everything for everybody, would settle smilingly upon the earth. So reasonable seemed the proposition that once apprised of it the oppressed classes could not fail to respond. The Anarchist task was to awaken them to the Idea by propaganda of the word and of the Deed, and one day, one such deed would flash the signal for revolt.

During the first and formulative period of Anarchism, beginning around the time of the revolutionary year 1848, its two major prophets were Pierre Proudhon of France and his disciple, Michael Bakunin, a Russian exile who became the active leader of the movement.

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me,” Proudhon proclaimed, “is a usurper and a tyrant; I declare him to be my enemy.… Government of man by man is slavery” and its laws are “cobwebs for the rich and chains of steel for the poor.” The “highest perfection” for free society is no government, to which Proudhon was the first to give the name “An-archy.” He excoriated government in a passion of contempt. “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled, censored, by persons who have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is every action and transaction to be registered, stamped, taxed, patented, licensed, assessed, measured, reprimanded, corrected, frustrated. Under pretext of the public good it is to be exploited, monopolized, embezzled, robbed and then, at the least protest or word of complaint, to be fined, harassed, vilified, beaten up, bludgeoned, disarmed, judged, condemned, imprisoned, shot, garroted, deported, sold, betrayed, swindled, deceived, outraged, dishonored. That’s government, that’s its justice, that’s its morality! And imagine that among us there are democrats who believe government to be good, socialists who in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity support this ignominy, proletarians who offer themselves candidates for President of the Republic! What hypocrisy!”

Proudhon believed that the “abstract idea of right” would obviate the need of revolution and man would be persuaded to adopt the stateless society through reason. What Bakunin added, learning from Russia under Nicholas I, was the necessity of violent revolution. As opposed to his rival, Karl Marx, who maintained that revolution would come only from an industrial proletariat, organized and trained for the task, Bakunin believed that immediate revolution could explode in one of the more economically backward countries—Italy, Spain or Russia—where the workers, though untrained, unorganized and illiterate, with no understanding of their own wants, would be ready to rise because they had nothing to lose. The task of the conscientious revolutionist was to popularize the Idea among the masses, hitherto bound in ignorance and prejudice by the ruling class. It was necessary to make them conscious of their own wants and “evoke” from them thoughts to match their impulses, thoughts of revolt. When this happened the workers would know their own will and then “their power will be irresistible.” Bakunin, however, lost control of the First International to Marx, who believed in organization.