The Proud Tower (67 page)

In 1900, reluctantly edging toward the political arena, a number of trade unions, representing about one quarter of the total membership, joined with the ILP and Hyndman’s group to form a Labour Representation Committee for the election of political candidates. The Fabian Society lukewarmly and temporarily joined also. As Secretary, the Committee chose Ramsay MacDonald, a thirty-four-year-old Scot who emerged from obscure beginnings to be a founder of the ILP and was recognized for an astute political sense. On discovering that the intellectuals were not, after all, to control policy, Hyndman’s group pulled out and the Fabians, finding the endeavor “not in our line,” never played a role. Coal and Cotton and the older craft unions remained hostile. Of the committee’s fourteen candidates put up for the general election of 1900, only two, Hardie and John Burns, were elected.

Then came the “staggering blow” of Taff Vale. On the strength of the decision other employers began to sue for damages, the unions lost case after case; with their funds held liable, the long-acknowledged right of strike was nullified and all the hard-won gains of collective bargaining suddenly vulnerable. Discouraged and disillusioned in the old principle of direct action, the unions faced into politics, determined to reverse Taff Vale in the only way possible: through Parliament. Union membership in the Labour Representation Committee more than doubled in two years and with union treasuries opening up, the Committee won three by-elections in 1902 and 1903, including one three-cornered contest at Durham. Will Crooks, a former cooper and borough councilman, born in a workhouse, Arthur Henderson of the Ironfounders, and David Shackleton, a weaver, took their places in the House called “the best club in London.”

Here indeed were new winds blowing through society. Yet they did not as yet seriously ruffle the class represented by the Tories. Its prevailing mood remained on the whole complacent. Tory philosophy accepted a surplus labour force as the fulcrum of the profit system, an economic law of nature not to be disturbed by legislation. Upper-class life continued so comfortable and pleasant that it was difficult to feel any urgency about reforming what
The Times
imperturbably called “imperfections of the Social Order.” When Keir Hardie in 1901 moved the first Socialist resolution ever presented to the House of Commons and spoke for twenty minutes on how the menace of the profit system, responsible for the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion and the London slums, could be remedied by common ownership of land and capital, “Mr. Balfour, coming back from dinner, smiled pleasantly on the Speaker, doubtless calculating that things as they were would last his time.”

By 1905 with a general election looming, concessions were necessary. Wooing the labour vote the Conservatives appointed a Royal Commission on Trades Disputes to report on the question of re-establishing the principle of non-liability. It even allowed a Trades Disputes Bill, which would have reversed Taff Vale, to go through committee and pass two readings in the House, though it did not go so far as to enact it. It faced unemployment sufficiently, if not very boldly, to enact an Unemployed Workmen’s Act which established Labour Bureaus to register the unemployed and to help them find work and to pay compensation in certain cases. The Act applied, however, only to London and its spirit was one of limited patching. The Tories had no really remedial program to offer because they did not want one.

As a minority party the Liberals needed the support of labour to win, especially to win by a large enough margin to free them of the Irish incubus. For them the appearance of independent labour candidates in the field could mean disaster. Faced with the danger of three-cornered contests which could only take away their votes, the Liberals now needed not merely support but alliance. Labour in the person of Ramsay MacDonald was ready to listen. In 1903 he and Herbert Gladstone, Chief Liberal Whip, worked out a secret pact by which the Liberals agreed not to contest thirty-five seats in return for the voting alliance of those labour M.P.’s elected. Keir Hardie, who was not consulted, would have regarded the arrangement as not only betrayal but superfluous. The Liberals would eventually discover, in his opinion, that without the working-class vote they were helpless; at that point they would either come to Labour or “go the Tory way.”

In mid-January, 1906, spread over a period of two weeks, as was then the custom, the General Election took place. Chinese slavery, Protection vs. Free Trade, the school tax, Taff Vale, all the issues aired over three years, resounded again. Chinese labour on the hills of Wales? roared Lloyd George rhetorically, “Heaven forbid!” The voice of the demagogue and the force of the irrational merely reinforced a general sense that the Tories had been in power too long and this time the demagogue and the irrational were right. People wanted a change and they got one.

The Liberals won in a gigantic landslide. They returned to Parliament with the unprecedented margin of 513–157. Not all of this was their own. Labour won a total of 53 seats, of whom 29 were elected by the Labour Representation Committee, and organized themselves in the House for the first time as a recognized party with their own Whips. The remaining 24 were trade-union representatives called Lib-Labs who accepted the Liberal Whip and did not affiliate with the Labour Party until 1909. All 53 voted with the 377 Liberals, as did 83 Irish, giving the victorious party an absolute, almost unwieldy majority of 356. Even without the Irish and Labour, their own majority of 220 made them free of ties to any group. For the first time they had what Gladstone always wanted, that “hideous abnormality,” as one Tory called it, a Liberal majority independent of the Irish vote.

The Labour accomplishment was even more startling and its implication was not missed. A friend of Sir Almeric Fitzroy who lost his seat in Lancashire attributed his defeat to the uprising of Labour and did not believe that the tariff and other issues played much part in the outcome but rather “the conviction, for the first time born in the working classes, that their social salvation is in their own hands.”

In recognition of the new arrival on the political scene, John Burns was named President of the Local Government Board, becoming the first workingman ever to hold Cabinet rank. “I congratulate you, Sir Henry,” he replied when Campbell-Bannerman, the new Prime Minister, offered him the post, “it will be the most popular appointment that you have made,” as in fact it proved. After a week’s enjoyment of the ruling-class embrace, Burns told Beatrice Webb, “I am a different man from what I was a week ago.” His enjoyment of Cabinet office was so patent that he reminded Sir Edward Grey of a sentence from the naturalist Gilbert White, “In June the tortoise grows elate and walks on the tips of his toes.”

For the Tories the result was the most overwhelming electoral defeat of a party in living memory. In the debacle even Balfour lost his seat, as did his brother Gerald, two members of his Cabinet, Alfred Lyttelton and St. John Brodrick, his cousin Lord Hugh Cecil, and, “saddest fate of all,” as
Punch
lamented, Henry Chaplin, Squire of England, after thirty-nine years as M.P. All subsequently found seats in by-elections but in the meantime the “new Demos” reigned in fat triumphant majority.

During the hectic days of canvassing in Manchester before the election, Balfour, with his extraordinary capacity for detachment, took time out to seek an answer to an older if less immediate question than whether or not he would return as Prime Minister. In 1903 Joseph Chamberlain had been asked by Theodor Herzl on behalf of the Zionists for support in obtaining a colonization charter for the Sinai peninsula. Unable to persuade the British authorities in Egypt, Chamberlain, who saw the Jews as enterprising agents of colonization, offered them Uganda in East Africa as a substitute for Palestine. In the time of agony of the Russian pogroms, when East European Jews were desperately seeking an escape from Europe, the Zionist Congress nevertheless refused the offer, and Balfour wanted to know why. Long concerned with the idea “that Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt,” he held the Uganda question in the back of his mind and in the heat of the election campaign questioned his political agent, a Mr. Dreyfus, about it. Dreyfus offered to bring along a friend and ardent Zionist, born in the Russian pale, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, then a thirty-two-year-old instructor of chemistry at Victoria University in Manchester. Balfour at his election headquarters in a Manchester hotel set aside fifteen minutes for his visitor and stayed to listen for over an hour. Weizmann was nervous at the prospect of explaining to the renowned statesman in his shaky English all the history and hopes, the divisions and crosscurrents of his people in fifteen minutes. “I plunged into a long harangue on the meaning of the Zionist movement … that nothing but a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms could keep the movement alive and that this conviction had to be based on Palestine and Palestine alone. Any deflection from Palestine was—well, a form of idolatry.… I was sweating blood and trying to find some less ponderous way of expressing myself.… Suddenly I said: ‘Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’

“He sat up, looked at me and answered: ‘But Dr. Weizmann, we have London.’

“ ‘That is true,’ I said, ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’ He leaned back and continued to stare at me.… I did not see him again until 1914.” Of the future Declaration that was to bear his name, Balfour said at the end of his life that “on the whole [it] had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.”

On the morning after his electoral defeat, Balfour visited a friend who for the first time in his life saw him “seriously upset.” However, he went to bed with a book, came down to lunch next day “quite rested and cheerful,” played golf in the afternoon and again on the day following, appeared thoroughly to enjoy himself and showed no curiosity about the continuing election results, “not even looking at a newspaper.” He ascribed the defeat to the rise of Labour and to the public’s desire for a change. Real issues had played little part, he noticed, audiences having refused to listen to argument.

Behind his carefree golf Balfour had been thinking. “The election of 1906 inaugurates a new era,” he wrote the next day to the King’s secretary, Francis Knollys, and the sudden emergence of a Labour party was its salient fact. It was the bid for power of a new claimant. In letters to several friends on this and the following day, Balfour opened his mind: something more was going on than the “ordinary party change.… What has occurred here has nothing to do with any of the things we have been squabbling over for the last three years.” Campbell-Bannerman “is a mere cork dancing on a torrent which he cannot control” and the full significance of the drama could not be understood unless it was seen in terms “of the same movement which has produced massacres in St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin.” His mind traveling ahead to the implications of this new development, Balfour wrote, at that moment of swollen Liberal victory, “It will end, I think, in the break-up of the Liberal Party.” More enlivened than depressed by the new terms of battle, he assured Knollys that he had no intention of withdrawing from politics, because “I am so profoundly interested in what is
now
going on.”

More clearly than most he sensed the beginnings of a transfer of power, not a mere political transfer from the in-party to the outs but one more profound, to a new class which, though as yet far from the possession of power, by its pressure on the possessors was causing upheaval in the components of society.

Meanwhile he had no seat. “I am certainly not going to go about the country explaining that I am honest and industrious like a second footman out of a place,” he remarked. A seat in the City of London being found for him, he returned to the House as Leader of the Opposition.

Others besides Balfour glimpsed in Liberalism’s victory the portents of its dissolution. To the Socialists this was the Marxian imperative. Robert Blatchford predicted that the Liberal party would try to carry out “a halfhearted policy in the hope of not estranging any of its moderate followers.” If they attempted really remedial social legislation they would lose the support of their capitalist backers, who would defect to the Tories. If they did nothing in social reform they would lose the support of the Radicals who elected them. In either case this would be their last Government. “The most certain of all aids to our cause is the inevitable disintegration of the Liberal Party.”

The Parliament of 1906 convinced the Tories of the rise of Socialism with its explicit threat to the existence of Privilege. Until now the landed aristocracy and squirearchy had believed that they could speak for the people, that their national interest was the same, that in that sense they were one. They believed in the benevolent working of Tory Democracy as long as it did not interfere with the existing order. They thought of the populace in terms of the rural and servant class whom they knew. George Wyndham, Chief Secretary for Ireland in Balfour’s Cabinet, a dithyrambic true-blue Tory who retained his seat in 1906, believed he had won, as he wrote his mother, “because the working men love me. I won by their hearts.… All my song has been the brotherhood of the Empire for us all, fair terms for the Foreigner, and the glory of Empire for our children with a little straight talk for Christianity in our schools.… I have opened my heart to all their hearts and we just love each other. I won on Toryism, Empire and Fiscal Reform. The Irish voted for me, the Fishermen voted for me, the Soldiers voted for me, the Artisans voted for me! Simply because we liked each other and love the traditions of the past and the Glory of the future.”

Wyndham’s charming Eighteenth Century picture, whatever the case in his own constituency, was for England, as for the rest of the world in 1906, as dead as the Prince Regent. The agricultural class was disappearing, seeping into the cities, and between the industrial proletariat which was replacing it and the patricians, there was no love or common interest. Wyndham and his kind knew nothing of miners and millhands and people who lived in long monotonous rows of urban houses. “Fancy,” said Winston Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace, when canvassing with a friend in Manchester they entered a particularly drab street, “living in one of those streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury—
never saying anything clever!
” The partakers of that fate were the new voters.