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Page 41
The reader may not remember that some years before Mr. Lloyd George
plunged into a disordered series of social reforms, Lord Leverhulme,
sitting in the House of Commons, introduced Bills of a reasonable and
connected character to ensure workmen against unemployment and to set up
a system of old age pensions. He did not enter Parliament for his own
glorification. He had nothing to gain, but much to lose, by devoting
himself to the business of Westminster. But he believed that he could
benefit the State as a legislator, and he entered Parliament with the
definite intention of introducing order into what was self-evidently a
condition of dangerous chaos. He had a remedy for slums, a remedy for
unemployment, a remedy for the poverty of the workman in old age, and a
remedy for the educational deadlock. Further, he cherished the hope that
he might do something towards developing the wealth and power of the
British Empire, without impairing the spirit of individualism which, in
his faith, is the driving power of British fortune.
How many men who entered the House of Commons with no ideas at all have
been taken to the friendly bosom of that assembly? Moreover, can the
reader name with confidence one Cabinet Minister in the past twenty
years who can fairly be compared in creative genius with this remarkable
man to whom the House of Commons refused the least of its rewards?
I saw Lord Leverhulme on several occasions at the end of the war. He
spoke to me with great freedom of his ideas in the hope that I might
carry them with effect to the Prime Minister. He proved to me that it
was the nonsense of a schoolboy to talk of making Germany pay for the
war, and suggested that the Prime Minister's main appeal to the nation
at the General Election of 1918 should be a moral appeal for unity in
the industrial world. He had one master word for that great moment in
our history. It was the word "Production."
I found this word unpopular in Downing Street. Mr. Lloyd George was more
mindful of Lord Northcliffe than of one "who cannot work with other
men." And so the word went forth to the British peoples: Germany must
pay for the war and the Kaiser must be tried. At the eleventh hour
before the election there was no equivocation. Germany _should_ pay for
the war. The Kaiser _should_ be tried. Instead of a great moral appeal,
which might have prevented all the disastrous conflicts in industry, and
might have preserved the spirit of loyalty which had united the people
during the war, the Prime Minister put himself at the head of a
disreputable mob calling for revenge.
"One disadvantage of the democratic system," says Mr. Birrell, "is that
a Prime Minister no longer feels himself responsible for good
government. He awaits a 'mandate' from a mob who are watching a football
match."
We have only to compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord
Leverhulme's to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend
more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside.
Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of
rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such
sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of
the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a
Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and
creative minds is the field of commerce.
The danger of the State from this condition of things is, unhappily, not
only the loss of creative statesmanship at the head of the
nation--serious as that is. The danger is greater. Small men are more
likely to fall into dishonest ways than big men. There lies, I think,
our greatest danger. It seems to me, observing our public life with some
degree of intimacy, that there is a growing tendency for the gentleman
to fall out of the political ranks and for his place to be filled by the
professional politician, who in many cases appears to be almost entirely
without moral principle. What can become of such a movement save
eventual corruption? At present our politics are stupid but fairly
honest. There are still representatives of the old school in the House
of Commons. But the conquering advance is from the ranks of
professionalism.
I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a
heaven-sent genius of statesmanship. The British constitution is twelve
men in a box, and the very spirit of that arrangement is distrust of the
expert. Moreover, there is wisdom in the Eastern legend which says that
in making genius the fairies left out one essential gift--the knowledge
of when to stop.
Whether Lord Leverhulme would have made a better statesman than, let us
say, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman or Mr. Bonar Law it is surely certain,
I think, that a true statesman would have made every conceivable use of
his unusual mind. This, as I look at things, is the ideal method of
government. I do not believe in the business man as statesman. I believe
in the trained, cultured, and incorruptible gentleman as statesman, and
the business man as his adviser.
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