At present he is but playing with politics. Even in his most earnest moments he is only "in politics" as a man is "in business." But politics for Mr. Churchill, if they are to make him, if they are to fulfil his promise, must be a religion. They must have nothing to do with Mr. Churchill. They must have everything to do with the salvation of mankind.
It is time, high time, he hitched his waggon to a star.
Ever since I first met him, when he was still in the twenties, Mr. Churchill has seemed to me one of the most pathetic and misunderstood figures in public life. People have got it into their heads that he is a noisy, shameless, truculent, and pushing person, a sort of intellectual Horatio Bottomley of the upper classes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mr. Churchill is one of the most sensitive of prominent politicians, and it is only by the exercise of his remarkable courage that he has mastered this element of nervousness. Ambition has driven him onward, and courage has carried him through, but more often than the public thinks he has suffered sharply in his progress. The impediment of speech, which in his very nervous moments would almost make one think his mouth was roofless, would have prevented many men from even attempting to enter public life; it has always been a handicap to Mr. Churchill, but he has never allowed it to stop his way, and I think it is significant both of his courage and the nervousness of his temperament that while at the beginning of a speech this thickness of utterance is most noticeable, the speaker's pale face showing two patches of fiery pink in his cheeks, the utterance becomes almost clear, the face shows no sign of self-consciousness, directly he has established sympathy with his audience. It is interesting to notice an accent of brutality in his speaking, so different from the suave and charming tones of Mr. Balfour; this accent of brutality, however, is not the note of a brutal character, but of a highly strung temperament fighting its own sensibilities for mastery of its own mind. Mr. Churchill is more often fighting himself than his enemies.
His health has been against him: his heart and his lungs have not given him the support he needs for his adventurous and stormy career. At times, when every man's hand has seemed to be against him, he has had to fight desperately with both body and mind to keep his place in the firing line. Some of his friends have seen him in a state of real weakness, particularly of physical weakness, and for myself I have never once found him in a truculent or self-satisfied frame of mind. I believe he is at heart a modest man, and I am quite certain he is a delicate and a suffering man. But for the devotion of his wife I think he could not have held his place so long.
Fate, too, has opposed him. His enemies are never tired of shouting the two names of Antwerp and Gallipoli. They are convenient terms of abuse: I suppose they would have destroyed most politicians; certainly they are more deadly than such a phrase as "spiritual home," for although the world may be ignorant of the fact, every honest, educated man must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the thinkers of ancient Germany, while to be associated with operations which involve the suffering, the death, and the defeat of British troops is in every way more fatal to reputation.
But, in truth, both these strokes of military strategy were sound in conception. I doubt indeed if the military historian of the future, with all the documents before him, will not chiefly condemn the Allies for their initial failure to make Antwerp a sea-fed menace to the back of the German Armies; while even in our own day no one doubts that if Lord Kitchener, in one of his obstinate moods, had not refused to send more divisions to Gallipoli we should have taken Constantinople. The fault of those operations lay not in attempting them but in not adequately supporting them.
Mr. Churchill has had bad luck in these matters, but even here it is the lack of character which has served him most ill. He never impressed Lord Kitchener as a man of power, although that sullen temperament grew in the end to feel an amused affection for him. He did excellent work at the Admiralty, work of the highest kind both before and at the outbreak of war, but his colleagues in the Cabinet never realized the importance of this work, judging it merely as "one of Winston's new crazes," Ministers speak of him in their confidences with a certain amount of affection, but never with real respect. Many of them, of course, fear him, for he is a merciless critic, and has an element of something very like cruelty in his nature; but even those who do not fear him, or on the whole rather like him, will never tell you that he is a man to whom they turn in their difficulties, or a man to whom the whole Cabinet looks for inspiration.
General William Booth of the Salvation Army once told Mr. Churchill that he stood in need of "conversion," That old man was a notable judge of character.
The Rt. Hon. Richard Burdon Haldane was born in 1856. Graduate of Edinburgh University; Professor of Philosophy, St. Andrew's University; Barrister, 1879; Q.C., 1890; created 1st Viscount, 1911; M.P. from Haddingtonshire, 1885-1911; Sec'y for War, 1905-12; Rector of Edinburgh Univ.; Chancellor, Univ. of Bristol; Author of various philosophical works.
RT. HON. RICHARD BURDON HALDANE
"He is Attic in the sense that he has no bombast, and does not strive after affect, and that he can speak interestingly on many subjects 'without raising his voice.'"—GILBERT MURRAY (on Xenophon).
If for nothing else, the nation owes Lord Haldane a debt of gratitude for the example he has given it in behaviour. No man so basely deserted by his colleagues and so scandalously traduced by his opponents ever faced the world with a greater calm or a more untroubled smile.
Lessing said of grief in sculpture that it may writhe but it must not scream. Lord Haldane has not even writhed. When a member of the House of Lords asked him what he proposed doing with the two sacks crammed full of abusive letters addressed to him there by correspondents who thus obeyed a vulgar editor's suggestion, Lord Haldane replied with very good humour, "I have an oyster-knife in my kitchen and an excellent scullery-maid in my establishment: I shall see only my personal letters."
In the darkest hour of his martyrdom, when the oldest and staunchest of his political friends maintained an absolute silence, he gave no sign of suffering and uttered no single word either of surprise or bitterness. He seemed to some of us in those days almost wanting in sensibility, almost inhuman in his serenity. Newspaper articles which made most of us either wince or explode with anger did nothing more to the subject of their vilification than to set him off laughing—a comfortable, soft-sounding, and enjoying laughter which brought a light into his face and gently shook his considerable shoulders. He loved to produce at those moments the encomiums pronounced on his work at the War Office by those very newspapers only a few years before at the hour of his triumphant retirement.
This tranquillity of spirit owed nothing to an unimpressionable mind or a thick skin. One came to see that it was actually that miracle of psychology, a philosophic temperament in action. I believe he could have the toothache without a grimace. He has not only studied philosophy, he has become a philosopher, and not merely a philosopher in theory but a philosopher in soul—a practising philosopher. He might stagger for a moment under the shock of a tremendous sorrow to one whom he loved, but not all the shovings of all the halfpenny editors of our commercialized journalism, not even the most contemptible desertion of his friends, could move his equilibrium by a hair's breadth.
After the noble tributes paid to him by Lord Haig and Lord French I need not trouble the reader by dealing with the accusations brought against the greatest of our War Ministers by the gutter-press or by the baser kind of politicians. It is now acknowledged in all circles outside of Bedlam that Lord Haldane prepared a perfect instrument of war which, shot like an arrow from its bow, saved the world from a German victory, and among the intellectual soldiers it is generally held that if France and Russia had been as well prepared to fulfil their engagements as we were to fulfil ours the war would have ended in an almost immediate victory for the Allies.[2]
It will be more instructive to ask how a man who never made an enemy in his life, and for whom many of our greatest men have a deep affection, came of a sudden to be the target of such general and overwhelming abuse. I think I can do something to clear up this mystery.
When he saw that the great conflict was inevitable, Lord Haldane suggested to Mr. Asquith, then acting as War Secretary, that he should go down to the War Office, where he was still well known and very popular with the intellectual generals, and mobilize his own machine for war. The harassed and overburdened Mr. Asquith gratefully accepted this suggestion.
Accordingly Lord Haldane went down to the War Office, and knowing that speed was the one thing to save us from a German avalanche, began to mobilize the Expeditionary Force. Some of the generals were alarmed. War was not yet declared. The cost of mobilization ran into millions. Suppose war did not come after all, how were those millions to be met? Lord Haldane brushed aside every consideration of this kind. Mobilization was to be pushed on, cost what it might. He had not studied his Moltke to no profit.
On leaving the War Office that same day, after having mobilized the British Army, he went across to the Foreign Office and was there stopped by a certain soldier who asked him how many divisions he was sending to France. Lord Haldane very naturally rebuked this person for asking such a question, telling him that war was not yet declared and that therefore perhaps no divisions at all would go to France.
Never was a just reproof more fatal to him who administered it.
I believe this soldier went straight off to an important Civil Servant with the sensational news that Lord Haldane was holding back the Expeditionary Force, and afterwards carried the same false news to one of the most violent anti-German publicists in London, a frenzied person who enjoys nevertheless a certain power in Unionist circles. In a few hours it was all over London that the Liberals were going to desert France, that Lord Haldane, a friend of the German Kaiser, had got back to the War Office, and that he was preventing mobilization.
I am quite willing to believe that the snubbed soldier honestly thought he was spreading a true story: I am sure that the frenzied publicist believed this story with all the lunatic fervour of his utterly untrained and utterly intemperate mind; but what I cannot bring myself to believe for a moment is that the Unionist statesman to whom this story was taken, and who there and then gave orders for a campaign against Lord Haldane, was inspired by any motive less immoral, less cynical, and less disgraceful to a man of honour than a desire for office.
He saw the opportunity of discrediting the Liberal Government through Lord Haldane and took it. The Cabinet was to fall under suspicion because one of its members could be accused of pro-Germanism. Lord Haldane, against whom his friend Lord Morley now brings the sorrowful charge that he was responsible for the war; Lord Haldane, against whom all the German writers have brought charges of stealing their War Office secrets and of defeating their diplomacy, was to be called a pro-German—a man actually doing Germany's work in the British War Office. And this for a Party purpose.
Mr. Arthur Balfour, by nature the most selfish of men and also an intemperate lover of office, would never have stooped to such dishonour; but among the leaders of the Unionist Party there was to be found a man who saw in a lie the opportunity for a Party advantage and took it.
In these matters a statesman need not show himself. A word to one or two newspaper proprietors is sufficient. Nor need he hunt up any arguments. The newspaper reporter will not leave a dust-bin unsearched. One word, nay, the merest hint is sufficient. So stupid, so supine, is the public, that Fleet Street will undertake to destroy a man's reputation in a week or two.
It was in this fashion that Lord Haldane fell.
"You have killed me," says Socrates, "because you thought to escape from giving an account of your lives. But you will be disappointed. There are others to convict you, accusers whom I held back when you knew it not, they will be harsher inasmuch as they are younger, and you will wince the more."
One day the full truth of this scandalous story will be told, and the historian will then pronounce a judgment which will leave an indelible stain on the reputation of some who with a guilty conscience now sun themselves in the prosperity of public approval. Their children will not read that judgment without bitter shame.
I condemn in this matter not only the man who gave the order for calumny and slander to set to work but, first, the friends of Lord Haldane who kept silence, and, second, the democracy of these islands which allowed itself to be deceived and exploited by the lowest kind of newspapers.
Why was Sir Edward Grey silent? He was living in Lord Haldane's house at the time, and, agonizing over the abhorrent prospect of European slaughter and striving to the point of a nervous collapse to avert this calamity, was devotedly served and strengthened by his host. Why was he silent?
Why was Mr. Asquith silent? He knew that Lord Haldane had delivered the War Office from chaos and had given to this country for the first time in its history a coherent and brilliantly efficient weapon for this very purpose of a war with Germany. He spoke when it was too late. Why did he not speak when the hounds were in full cry?
And why were Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill silent? Could they not have told the nation that they had grudged Lord Haldane his Army estimates, and that they had even suggested another and less expensive scheme of national defence—a scheme that was actually examined by the War Office experts and condemned?
Let Mr. Lloyd George look back. If he had had his way with the War Office could Germany have been stopped from reaching Paris and seizing the Channel ports? Moreover, if he had had his way, could he himself have hoped to escape hanging on a lamp-post? Is it not true to say that in saving France from an overwhelming and almost immediate destruction the British Expeditionary Force also saved his neck, the neck of Mr. Winston Churchill, and the necks of all the Cabinet? But if this is so, and his own conscience shall be the judge, how is it that he said no word to the nation which might have saved Lord Haldane from martyrdom?
The nation, I think, does not know what it loses in allowing its judgment to be stampeded by unconscionable journalism. Lord Haldane is no political dilettante. Few men in modern times have brought to politics a mind so trained in right thinking, or a spirit so full of that impressive quality, as Morley calls it, the presentiment of the eve: "a feeling of the difficulties and interests that will engage and distract mankind on the morrow." Long ago he foresaw the need in our industrial life of the scientific spirit, and in our democracy of a deeper and more profitable education. "Look at Scotland, the best educated nation; and at Ireland, the worst!" For these things he prepared. Long ago, too, he thought out a better and a complete system of Cabinet government. Long ago he had seen that the enmity between Capital and Labour must be brought to an end and an entirely new relation brought into existence, identifying the prosperity of the one with the other. For this, too, he had a scheme. These things were the chief concern of his life, and only for these things did he remain in politics.
The nation would have been in a healthier condition if Lord Haldane's reasoned policy had been acted upon and Mr. Lloyd George's talent for oratory had been employed to explain that reasoned policy to the less educated sections of the public, instead of used to arouse an angry opposition to the unreasoned and disconnected reforms of his own conception.
But what a topsy-turvy world! Mr. Lloyd George is "the man who won the war," he who did nothing to prepare for it, and suggested some things that might have made it difficult to be won; while Lord Haldane, who did prepare for it, and whose work did save the whole world, is cast out of office. And when the war is won, and Lord Haldane's position has been publicly and nobly vindicated by Lord Haig, Mr. Lloyd George as Prime Minister of England has a portfolio for Mr. Austen Chamberlain and another for Dr. Macnamara, but none for this man to whom more than to any other politician he owes his place and perhaps his life.
Lord Haldane is not what Prodicus used to call "a Boundary Stone, half philosopher and half practical statesman." His philosophy is his statesmanship, and his statesmanship is his philosophy. He has brought to the study of human life a profound mind and a trained vision. His search after truth has destroyed in him all pettiness of personal ambition. He desires, because he regards it as the highest kind of life, to further the work of creative evolution, to be always on the side of spiritual forces, and never to be deceived by transitory materialism. Democracy has need of these qualities, and a great empire without such qualities in its statesmen can hardly endure the test of time.
His faults are a too generous confidence in the good sense of democracy and a lack of impassioned energy. He is too much a thinker, too little a warrior. Unhappily he is not an effective speaker, and his writing is not always as clear as his ideas. He is at his best in conversation with men whom he likes.
His activity is enormous, but it is the activity of the scholar. He works far into the night, takes little or no exercise, and avoids "that dance of mimes"—the life of society. By hard reading he keeps himself abreast of knowledge in almost every one of its multitudinous departments and will go a long journey to hear a scientific lecture or to take part in a philosophical discussion. He is the friend of philosophers, theologians, men of science, men of letters, and many a humble working man. He was never privately deserted in the long months of his martyrdom. His charming London house, so refined and so dignified in its simplicity, was the frequent meeting-place of many even in those bad days when the door outside was daubed with paint, the windows broken, and a police-man stood on guard. A few of us wished he took his ill-treatment with a fiercer spirit; but looking back now I think that even the youngest of us perceives that he was unconsciously teaching us by his behaviour one of the noblest lessons to be learned in the school of life.
Let his fate teach democracy that when it has found a leader whom it can trust, it must be prepared to fight for him as well as to follow him. No statesman is safe from the calumny of newspapers, and no statesman violently and persistently attacked in a crisis can depend upon the loyalty of his colleagues. It is not in our politics as it is in our games.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] It is well known that Lord Haig regards Lord Haldane as the greatest Secretary of State for War that England ever had; he has expressed his gratitude again and again for the manner in which Lord Haldane organized the military forces of Great Britain for a war on the Continent. Lord French has said: "He got nothing but calumny and abuse; but the reward to such a man does not come in the ordinary way. I had proved the value of his great work and that is all the reward he ever wanted."
First Baron, 1916. Born, in Aberdare, Wales, 1856; died, 1919. Educated with tutors, and later at Caius College, Cambridge; Scholar also, of Jesus; President South Wales Liberal Federation, 1893-97; M.P. for Merthyr, 1888-1910; for Cardiff, 1910; Food Controller, 1917-1919.
"Whereof what better witness can ye expect I should produce than one of your own now sitting in Parliament."—MILTON.
In the Merry Passages and Jests of old Sir Nicholas Lestrange record is made of the following witty definition: "Edm. Gurney used to say that a mathematitian is like one that goes to markett to buy an axe to break an egg."
This perhaps had been the fate of Lord Rhondda, for he was by nature of a true mathematical turn, had not the circumstances of his economic life forced him to apply this natural tendency to the practical affairs of commerce. But nature herself had given him with this aptitude for mathematics another quality which must eventually, one would suppose, have saved him from the unfruitful fate of a theorist—he was a man of rare imagination. And so this mathematician, who was also a poet, brought a unique mind to the affairs of commerce and there scored a success which attracted attention in both hemispheres.
I do not know a better example to illustrate the main thesis of this book than the case of Lord Rhondda. No doubt the case of a greater man, Lord Leverhulme, would lend itself to a far stronger illustration of that thesis, but, unfortunately for my argument and for the nation, Lord Leverhulme has never had an opportunity of vindicating in office those qualities which the House of Commons neglected or overlooked during the years in which, like Lord Rhondda, he sat humbly on its back benches.
For the best part of his manhood Lord Rhondda was a political failure. The House of Commons, which prides itself on its judgment of men, treated him as a person of no importance. He represented one of the largest industrial constituencies in the country, was always returned by an overwhelming majority, and was known to be in his own district an administrator of far-reaching talent; but because he could not speak effectually, and because the House of Commons—that most self-satisfied assembly of mediocrities—did not take to him, he was never offered by his political leaders during all the long years of his patient service even an under-secretaryship.
This was the man who saved the nation from one of its greatest perils during perhaps the most critical period of the war.
As one examines Lord Rhondda's administration of the Ministry of Food one discovers an interesting and surely an important fact in the psychology of our public life.
His triumph, which was one of the greatest in the war, lay almost entirely in the region of personality. For his gravest difficulties were not so much in the office of the Ministry as in the great and grumbling world outside, where toiling men and women stood outside provision shops for hours in the rain and cold only to be told in the vast majority of cases when their turn came that supplies were exhausted for that day.
By the power of his imagination Lord Rhondda saw that the first step towards saving a very perilous situation was to convince this vast world of seething discontent that absolute justice should characterize the administration of his office. To this end, satisfied that those about him were men of devoted zeal and real talent, he set himself to the creation of a public opinion favourable to the discharge of his duties. And by a stroke of inspiration he saw that to achieve this tranquillity of the public mind he must give his own personality to the world. His character must become a public possession. A man, and not an office, must stand for Food Control. The instinct of the Briton for justice and fair play must receive assurance from a moral personality.
Therefore no member of the Government was more accessible, or more ready to be interviewed and photographed, than the Food Controller. It was not vanity, but foreseeing statesmanship, which opened his door to the humblest newspaper reporter who visited the Ministry. His personality—a moral, just, fearless, and confident personality—had to be conveyed to the mind of the public, and every interview he gave to the Press had this important objective for its reason. He saw the morals of an economic situation, and he solved those economics very largely by making a moral impression on the public mind.
The work of his office was carried to victory by Sir William Beveridge, Captain Tallents, Professor Gonner, and other very able men in charge of rationing; but this work must have failed had it not been for public confidence in Lord Rhondda's integrity; and, moreover, Lord Rhondda's character played no small part in firing that work with a zeal and passion which were excelled by no other department of public service. Men not only worked hard for him, they worked for him affectionately.
His choice of Mr. J.H. Clynes was inspired by the same idea. He had heard this labour member speak, and had been impressed by the moral qualities of his oratory; he knew that in choosing him to represent the Food Ministry in the House of Commons he might be sure of the confidence of Labour, both there and in the circles of trade unionism. He was not deceived. Mr. Clynes was the most loyal and impressive of lieutenants, who, on one occasion in particular, saved a difficult situation.
Lord Rhondda realized the moral qualities of statesmanship. He appealed to the highest instincts of his countrymen. This was his greatest achievement.
He was in many ways a lovable man. The quality which chiefly drew people to him was his extreme boyishness. The remarkable beauty of his face always seemed to me an expression of this delightful boyishness—his smile deepening this effect in a most charming manner. He loved life with a boy's fervour, regarding it always as an opportunity for winning success. The difficulties of work, like the difficulties of a mathematical problem called out the athletic qualities of an otherwise shy and almost effeminate nature. He loved to pit his brains against other men, rejoiced to discover obstacles in his path, never despaired when things went against him, and infinitely preferred the battle for success to the success itself. In this, too, he was a boy; he had to win a fight fairly and honourably to enjoy the victory. I believe him to have been one of the most honest and straightforward men that ever made a fortune in business.
There was no man less embittered by failure and disappointment. He seems to have had reason to believe that Mr. Lloyd George frustrated his early efforts as a politician, indeed he told me more than once that Mr. Lloyd George had deliberately set himself to that end; and yet it was at Mr. Lloyd George's earnest beseeching that he accepted the office of Food Controller, and once a member of his Cabinet, he seldom spoke of this old opponent without the warmest admiration. "You can't trust him a yard," he said to me on one occasion laughing very good-naturedly; "but there is not a man in the Government who can hold a candle to him for courage and inspiration. I know very well that I could never have done what he has done. More than any man in the country he has pulled us through the critical days of the war. He is wonderful—nothing short of wonderful—and sometimes I feel almost fond of him, for he has many likeable sides to his character; all the same, I know very well he is not to be trusted. I took office on certain conditions, not one of which has he observed. He is one of those men with whom you cannot deal confidently."
This was the bitterest thing I ever heard him say of his former enemy. As regards the old days in the House of Commons, he told me that there was room for only one leader in Wales, and that, while Mr. Lloyd George could speak, he couldn't, and so Mr. Lloyd George, who was consumed by personal ambition, had won the battle. In saying this he smiled like a boy, and only grew serious when he added of those wasted years, "The bother is I had a lot of useful things I wanted to do for the country."
He was convinced that he could have paid off the whole of the National Debt during those years.
A good judge of statesmen said of Lord Rhondda that he would have made the greatest Chancellor of the Exchequer these islands had ever possessed. I do not think there can be any doubt of this, for his genius lay in figures and he had extraordinary swiftness in seeing his way through expensive chaos to economical order. His mind was constructive, if not positively creative. He was never happier—except when birds'-nesting or romping with young people—than when he was in an arm-chair working out with pencil and paper some problem of administration which involved enormous figures. He would sit up to the small hours of the morning over his work, and would come down to breakfast radiant with happiness, bursting with energy, exclaiming, "I had a glorious time last night!" Certainly he would have brought to the Treasury an original mind, and a mind, moreover, profoundly acquainted with the activities of trade and commerce—those important factors in national finance which appear to cut so small a figure in the minds of bankers and officials.
Although a rather dull speaker, few men of my acquaintance were more lucid and convincing in conversation, particularly when he addressed a sympathetic mind. This was notably the case when he was unfolding his ideas on the conflicting theories of Individualism and Socialism. If his conversations on this head could be printed in a book they would make difficult work even for the most ingenious apologists of Socialism. He was persuaded that no theory of Socialism could be put into successful practice without involving the loss of personal freedom, and that without Individualism there would be no initiative, no audacity, and no creative energy in the development of an industry. Whenever he was in conflict with Socialists he would say to them, "Why don't you buy me out and run the mines yourselves? You have plenty of money in your unions, and I am quite willing to sell."
There were several strange and interesting movements in his otherwise quite simple and boyish nature. For example, he had no religious faith worth speaking about, certainly no dogmatic faith of any kind; but he always said his prayers. Then he held the theory that old age was a form of disease, and so avoided, as much as possible, the society of old people, fearing contagion; the young people with whom he loved to surround himself, and on whom he delighted to play many practical jokes, he called his "young germs."
He was entirely free from all forms of snobbishness, and would make fun of titles and honours and ridicule aristocratic pretensions; yet he went somewhat painfully out of his way to get a title from his Party when he retired from the House of Commons, and was justly indignant at the way this bargain was broken by the Liberal leaders of that day. I think he wanted a title at that time chiefly to prove to his constituents that he had faithfully done his duty by them.
He seldom read a book of any account after he came down from Cambridge, but hardly a day of his life passed that he did not learn by heart a number of fine sayings which appealed to him in a book of quotations. These quotations he would fire off at his family till they cried for mercy, or another set.
He was far happier among his Herefords at Llanwern than in London or in Cardiff, but he was for ever postponing the day of his retirement from public life. He kept all his boy's love for birds and animals, and had real feeling for beautiful things in nature; but the game of life drew him always towards the city.
At one time he smoked a prodigious number of cigars and drank a bottle of port every night, but about twenty years before his death he gave up both habits on the challenge of a friend and never reverted to them again. Mr. William Brace, the miners' leader, said to me one day, "Rhondda has the income of a duke and the tastes of a peasant, whereas I have the income of a peasant and the tastes of a duke." I told Lord Rhondda this, and he smiled quietly over the remark, saying, "He's a very pleasant fellow, Brace: fond of pictures, and a good judge of them, too. Yes, I suppose my tastes are rather simple when you come to look at them, but I don't find them cheap." He was on excellent terms with Labour politicians, knew many of the old miners with real intimacy, and could handle large bodies of men with consummate tact.
I do not think for a moment that he was a very great man, but I can think of few Cabinet ministers during the last thirty years who were anything like so well-fitted to render the nation real and lasting service. Lord Rhondda had genius, and though a boyish egoist in his private life he was earnestly and most eagerly anxious to sacrifice all he possessed for the good of the State. That he came so late and for so brief a period to power I regard, if not as a national misfortune, at any rate as a striking condemnation of our methods of government.
Born, 1865. Head of firm of Andrew Weir and Co. shipowners of Glasgow, Surveyor General of Supplies, 1917-19; Minister of Munitions, 1919.
"Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people."—DR. JOHNSON.
We are keeping up Voltaire's idea of our English character. Instead of only admirals, however, we are now hanging all sorts and descriptions of our public servants, but whether to encourage the others or to pay off a grudge, who shall determine?
Lord Inverforth takes his hanging very well. One might go so far as to say that he is not merely unaware of the noose round his neck but so perverse as to think he is still alive. His sense of humour is as good to him as a philosophic temperament.
I like his sense of humour. It manifests itself very quietly and with a flash of unexpectedness. One day at luncheon he was speaking of Lord Leverhulme, whose acquaintance he had made only a week or two before. Someone at the table said, "What I like about Leverhulme is his simplicity. In spite of all his tremendous undertakings he preserves the heart of a boy." With a twinkle in his eyes, and in a soft inquiring voice, "Have you ever tried to buy glycerine from him?" asked Lord Inverforth.
This story has a sequel. I mentioned it to Lord Leverhulme. "One day two Englishmen," he replied at once, "were passing the Ministry of Munitions. They saw Lord Inverforth going in. One who did not recognize him said, 'Anyone can tell that man; he's a Scotsman.' To which the other, who did recognize him, replied, 'Yes, but you couldn't tell that Scotsman anything else.' You might repeat that story to Lord Inverforth the next time you meet him."
I did, and the Minister of Munitions accepted the compliment with a good grace.
It is a fortunate thing for this country that a man of so remarkable a genius for organization as Lord Inverforth should be found willing to serve the national interests in spite of an almost daily campaign of abuse directed against his administration. I sometimes wish he would bring an action for libel against one of these critics. It would be an amusing case. He might claim damages of, let us say, £7,000,000 or even £10,000,000, for he is a man of gigantic interests, claiming these damages on the score that his alleged libellers have injured his reputation as a man of business in all quarters of the world. They would have him the craziest muddler and the most easily swindled imbecile outside Fleet Street—where alone wisdom is to be found. How one would enjoy a verbatim report of the cross-examination of these critics in their own newspapers.
I will endeavour to show that Lord Inverforth is not quite so consummate an ass as his critics would have the public to believe, but rather one of the very greatest men, in his own particular line, who ever came to the rescue of a chaotic Government.
Let me not be supposed to insist that a great man of business is a great man. I regard Lord Inverforth as an exceedingly great man of business, one of the very greatest in the world, and this fact I hope to make clear in a few lines, but I do not regard him as a national hero in the wider sense of that term. He has too many lacks for that, and some of them essential to true and catholic greatness.
He could never fire the imagination of a people, nor does he convey a warm and generous feeling to the heart. His enthusiasms are all of a subdued nature. The driving force in his character which has made him so powerful a man of business, owes little to the higher virtues. He has found the plain of life too full of absorbing interest and too crowded with abounding opportunities for getting on to raise his eyes to the mountains. This is not to say that he is a man of no ideals, but to say that his ideals are of too practical and prosaic a kind ever to stir the pulses with excitement.
Nevertheless I regard him as a born statesman, and could wish that the conditions of political life made it more easy for a man of his gifts to serve the country than men with the gifts of, let us say, Dr. Macnamara or Sir Hamar Greenwood.
The world knows so little of him that perhaps I may begin my political reflections in this case with a brief summary of his career, such details of a business man's biography as may contribute to an understanding of his character.
Andrew Weir, as he was in those days, went to school at Kirkcaldy, where he was chiefly notable for seeking information on more subjects than came under the jurisdiction of his pedagogue's ferule. A benign Rosa Dartle might have been his godmother. He was for ever consulting encyclopædias and books of reference. However badly he knew his Greek verbs or his Latin syntax he had a very shrewd and curious knowledge of the world when he left school at fifteen to enter the local branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland.
At school he had wanted to own ships. This ambition still lodged in his brain. His thoughts were all at sea. There was no romance in the world so pleasing to his soul as the romance of the merchant marine. He had a real passion for harbours. He loved the idea of far voyages. The smells of cargoes and warehouses composed a sea-bouquet for him which he esteemed sweeter than all the scents of hedges and wood. If there was a big man for him in the world it was the sailor.
I don't think he had so profound a feeling for bankers. Not quite so downright as Lord Leverhulme in stating his opinion of bankers, Lord Inverforth nevertheless regards them on the whole as lacking in courage and imagination. He said to himself on his banker's stool, "I will learn all I can, but I won't stay here; I'll be a shipowner."
In his twentieth year he bought a sailing ship. This was at Glasgow in the year 1885. He called himself Andrew Weir and Co. He had the feeling that sailing ships, engaged in coastwise trade, might be bigger. He announced his intention of building a large coasting ship. People informed him, with an almost evangelical anxiety as to his commercial salvation, that he was a lunatic. But the big ship was a success. He built more and bigger. Then, in 1896 he said to himself, "Why shouldn't steam be used in the coasting trade?" and he went into steam. Again there were inquiries after his mental health, but the steamer flourished like the big sailing ship. At the beginning of what the curate called "this so-called twentieth century" the firm of Andrew Weir and Co. flew its flag in all the ports under heaven, and controlled the largest fleet of sailing ships in the world.
There is this fact to be noticed in particular. Mr. Andrew Weir's inquisitive mind had not merely mastered the grammar of shipowning but had crammed the cells of his brain with the whole encyclopædia of commercial geography. He knew each season what the least of the islands of the world was producing, and the crops, manufactures, and financial condition of every country across the sea. He knew, also, the way in which the various nations conducted the business of transport. From his office in Glasgow he could see the whole vast labours of industrious and mercantile man, that Brobdingnagian ant of this revolving globe, merely by closing his eyes. The map of the world's commerce was cinematographed upon his brain.
One thing more remains to be said. Mr. Andrew Weir inherited the moral traditions of Scotch industry. He grew rich, but not ostentatious. His increasing fortune went back and back into trade. He never dreamed either of cutting a figure in plutocratic society or making himself a public character. A quiet, rather shy, and not often articulate person, he lived a frugal life, loving his business because it occupied all his time and satisfied nearly every curiosity of his inquiring mind.
War came, and Mr. Weir was busier than ever with his ships. Not until 1917 did it occur to the Government that the work of buying supplies for its gigantic armies was something only to be mastered by a man of business. The nation may be grateful to Mr. Lloyd George for having discovered in Glasgow perhaps the one man in the British Isles who knew everything there was to know about commercial geography.
Mr. Andrew Weir entered the War Office in March, 1917, as Surveyor General of Supply. The position was not merely difficult in its nature, but difficult in its circumstances. Soldiers are jealous animals, and not easily does the War Office take to the black-coated man of business. Mr. Weir was tact itself. For some weeks the soldiers were hardly aware of his presence, then they learned that the quiet Scotsman in the black coat was saying the most laudatory things about their organization; then they found themselves marvellously improving this organization merely by acting on the most modestly given suggestions from the smooth civilian; and finally the very greatest of them discovered that somehow or another Supply had now got a wonderful "move on," and that among other things this wonderful "move on" had brought the civilian on top of them—still smooth and modest, still in the background, but absolute master of the whole machinery.
Lord Inverforth's work soon involved not merely the care of the British Armies but the care of the Allied nations. What did he do? Besieged by the unconscionable rascals of the world, fawning or blustering to get contracts at extraordinary prices, Lord Inverforth struck a master blow at this international cupidity by obtaining control of the principal raw materials and instituting the system of costing. Manufacturers got their contracts on a fixed basis of profits. Lord Inverforth knew the exact cost of every stage in the manufacture of each article he bought, and he saw that the manufacturer received from the taxpayer only a small percentage of profit on that cost.
The greatest thing he did at that time, and the bravest, for he did it without authorization and at a cost of £250,000,000, was to buy up the Australasian wool-clip from 1917 to 1920. In this way Germany was doomed to defeat. England, so to speak, had the clothing of humanity in her right hand.
But Lord Inverforth also controlled flax, hemp, leather, and jute, so that the enemy's case was as hopeless as our own was secure.
These gigantic operations involved an expenditure of over £500,000,000. They brought an actual profit to the British Government of over £20,000,000, saved the taxpayer Heaven only knows how many millions, and were conducted at an administrative cost of three shillings for every £100.
Nothing like it had ever been done before in the world.
Early in 1919 Lord Inverforth was asked to clear up war's rubbish-heap. He became Minister of Munitions. Within twenty-four hours his body of expert buyers had become the Disposal Board—a body of expert sellers.
The property of the British taxpayer was scattered over four continents, and in all manner of places in those four continents. It was composed of 350,000 different kinds of things.
At once Lord Inverforth was again besieged by the rascals. There was an army of them, composed of many "rings," seeking to buy up these "waste products of war" at a knock-down price. At the same time came the blustering contractor, cheated by peace of his contract, with a claim for millions on one ground or another.
Lord Inverforth made it clear, first, that the stores were to be sold at a commercial value, and, second, that he would protect the taxpayer against extortionate claims on the part of contractors. As regards this second difficulty, pressure was brought against him from the very highest political quarters to admit certain claims and to avoid legal action. His reply was, "I will resign before I initial those claims."
He fought them all, and he beat them all. He saved the taxpayer millions of pounds.
As for the disposal of stores, he has already brought to the Exchequer over £500,000,000, and before these pages are printed that sum may be increased to something like £800,000,000.
The least imaginative reader will perceive from this brief statement that a veritable Napoleon of Commerce has presided over the business side of the war. Where there was every opportunity for colossal waste, there has been the most scientific economy; where there was every likelihood of wholesale corruption, there has been an unsleeping vigilance of honesty; and where, at the end, there might have been a tired carelessness resulting in ruinous loss, there has been up to the very last moment an unremitting enthusiasm for the taxpayers' interest which has resulted in a credit contribution to the national balance sheet of £800,000,000.
I have left to the last this not unworthy feature of Lord Inverforth's labours. Those labours have been given to the nation. He, at the head of things, and the chiefs of the Disposal Board under him, have refused to accept any financial reward. One and all they deserted their businesses and slaved from morning to night in the national interests, and one and all they gave their services to the State.
What has been Lord Inverforth's reward from the public? From first to last he has been attacked by a considerable section of the Press, and has been accused in Parliament of incredible waste and incorrigible stupidity. Let it be supposed (I do not grant it for a moment) that he made mistakes, even very great mistakes, still, on the total result of his gigantic labours, does not the public owe him a debt of gratitude? Has he not been an honest man at the head of a department where dishonesty had its chief opportunity? Did he not strike a death blow at Germany when he secured, with a suddenness which ruined his rivals in the field, the wool-clip of the world? Is there one man in these islands who thought for a moment that the overplus of stores would fetch a sum of £800,000,000?
I will say a word about Slough, which is still the favourite cry of Lord Inverforth's critics, who have held their peace about the "dumps" since the publication of the White Paper describing the sale of stores.
Slough was the work of the War Office. It was begun badly. Mistakes of a serious kind were made. It might have been a financial disaster. But Lord Inverforth is a chivalrous man. He has never disclosed the fact that he inherited Slough. In the face of violent criticism he has maintained a dignified silence, letting the world think that he was the parent of the idea, and bending all his energies to make it a success. He has had his reward. Slough has been sold and the transaction shows a profit for the taxpayer.
During the last years of his administration I saw a good deal of Lord Inverforth. He was anxious to get back to his own work. He asked again and again to be relieved of his duties—the machinery he had set up being in excellent running order. But the Prime Minister begged him to stay, and he has stayed, against his will and against his own interests, and all the time he has been subjected to a stream of malignant criticism.
Let the reader ask himself whether the case of Lord Inverforth is likely to encourage the best brains in the country to come to the political service of the nation. Is there not a danger that we may fall into the American position, and have our great men in commerce and our second-rate men in politics?
I regard Lord Inverforth as one of the few very great men in commerce who have the qualities of genuine statesmanship. I am not at liberty to give my chief grounds for this belief, but before long the world may know from Lord Inverforth's commercial activities on the Continent that more than any other man in these islands he has seen the way and taken the step to reconstruct the shattered civilization of Europe.
On many occasions I have discussed with him the future of mankind. I have found him the least anxious and always the most self-possessed observer of events. Quiet, patient, practical, and imaginative, inspired too by humane motives, he cherishes the unshakable faith that Great Britain is destined to lead civilization into the future as far as human eye can see. He places his faith in British character. Rivalry on the part of powerful nations, even when it is directed against our key industries, does not disturb him in the least. While others are crying, "How shall we save ourselves?" he is pushing the fortunes of the British race in every quarter of the world. And where British trade goes, on the whole there goes too the highest civilizing power in the world—British character. It is significant of his faith that he has ever worked to get the British mercantile marine manned by men of the British race, and to this end has led the way in improving the conditions of the British seaman's life.
"All the fallacies and wild theories of revolutionary minds," he once said to me, "break ultimately on the rock of industrial fact. The more freely nations trade together the more clearly will it be seen that humanity must work out its salvation within the limits of economic law. And the way to a smooth working out of that salvation is by recognizing the claims of the moral law. We are men before we are merchants. There is no reason why mistrust should exist between management and labour. The economic law by no means excludes, but rather demands, humaneness. I believe that a system of profit sharing can be devised which will bring management and labour into a sensible partnership. Selfishness on the part of capital is as bad as selfishness on the part of labour. Both must be unselfish, both must think of the general community, and both must work hard. The two chief enemies of mankind are moral slackness and physical slackness."
There is no man living who would make a better Chancellor of the Exchequer than this merchant prince who, however, has had enough of politics and is going back very gladly to his desk in the City. He is not in the least soured by the public ingratitude, and rightly judges it to be rather the voice of unscrupulous and stunt-seeking journalism than the considered judgment of the nation. But he has a very poor opinion of the way in which the Government of the country conducts its business.
Born 1851, Lancashire. Educ.: Bolton Church Institute; Chairman of Lever Bros., Port Sunlight; High Sheriff, Lancaster, 1917.
"Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organized and more naturally cohesive inter se. So the Arctic volcano can do nothing against Arctic ice."—SAMUEL BUTLER.
The reader may properly wonder to find the figure of Lord Leverhulme brought before the mirrors of Downing Street.
But let me explain why I introduce this industrial Triton into the society of our political minnows.
Lord Leverhulme rejected politics only when politics rejected him. He is of that distinguished company to whom the House of Commons has turned both a deaf ear and a cold shoulder. He failed where Mr. Walter Long succeeded, and fell where Dr. Macnamara rose.
I once asked a Cabinet Minister how it was that a man of such conspicuous quality had failed to win office. "I really cannot tell you," he replied with complacency, "but I remember very well that the House of Commons never took to him. It is curious how many men who do well outside the House of Commons fail to make good inside."
Curious indeed! But more curious still, we may surely say, that the House of Commons should continue, in the light of this knowledge, to enjoy so good an opinion of itself.
I suppose that nobody will now dispute that Lord Leverhulme is easily the foremost industrialist, not merely in the British Isles, but in the world. I can think of no one who approaches him in the creative faculty. Not even America, the country of big men and big businesses, has produced a man of this truly colossal stature. Mr. Rockefeller is a name for a committee. Mr. Carnegie was pushed to fortune by his more resolute henchmen. But Lord Leverhulme, as is very well known in America, has been the sole architect of his tremendous fortunes, and in all his numerous undertakings exercises the power of an unquestioned autocrat.
Mr. Lloyd George once remarked to me that the trouble with Lord Leverhulme is that he cannot work with other men. But this is only true in part. Lord Leverhulme can work very well with men who are not fools. When I told him of Mr. Lloyd George's remark, "Well, I don't know," he replied, "I have been working with other men all my life!" Yes, but this, too, expresses only part of the truth. He has been working with these other men as an accepted master.
It is not so in politics. There a man of power cannot pick and choose his colleagues. He must work with fools as well as men of ability. And never can he work as a master. Always at the Cabinet table he will find a cabal of deadheads opposed to the exercise of his authority, and in the department over which he is set to rule a bunch of traditional Barnacles, without one spark of imagination between them, who will fight his new ideas at every turn.
The essence of politics and government is mediocrity. The good sense of the House of Commons is a conspiracy to resist genius and to enthrone the average man. A department of the State is well governed only when its chief Civil Servant, by the grace of God, chances to be a man of statesmanlike capacity.
Like Lord Rhondda, Lord Leverhulme was approached by the Government during the numerous crises of the war to render service to the State. His experience in this respect confirmed his judgment that our system of government is a chaos which would hardly be tolerated in a business establishment of the second class. I will give an incident.
It was a matter of grave urgency to the Government that margarine should be manufactured in this country. A Cabinet Minister begged Lord Leverhulme, on the score of patriotism, to set up such a factory. Lord Leverhulme expressed his willingness to take up the project, but said that he must go to the public for a certain sum of money to carry it out. The Cabinet Minister made no demur to this very natural proposal, but suggested that it might be well if Lord Leverhulme would call at the Treasury and inform them of his purpose.
Accordingly the great industrialist, able as was no other man in this particular to serve his country's need, called humbly at the Treasury for permission to ask the public for capital. He was received by an official who refused point-blank to listen to such a proposition. Lord Leverhulme mentioned again the name of the Cabinet Minister who had requested him to embark on this venture. This was nothing to the official. He had nothing to do with other departments. His business was to see that the public's money came to the Treasury; he was certainly not going to countenance the raising of money for an industrial purpose.
You could no more have got into this gentleman's head than you could have got into the head of a rabbit the idea that money invested in an essential industrial undertaking pays the State far better than money advanced to it at the cost of five per cent.
Not to weary the reader with an incident, however telling, the end of this affair was that after going backwards and forwards between a Cabinet Minister and a Treasury official, Lord Leverhulme was at last permitted to ask the public for a small sum of money which he himself considered inadequate for the Government's purpose.
I have never heard him speak bitterly of his political experiences, but I have never heard him express anything but an amused contempt for the antiquated machinery which passes amongst politicians for a system of government.
The English [he says] have pushed their fortunes, never by the aid of Government, but on the contrary almost always in the teeth of Government opposition. There is no man so lacking in imagination as a Government official, and no man, unless it is a banker, so wanting in courage as a Cabinet Minister. The wealth of England is the creation of her industrial population. The brains, the faith, the energy of the capitalist, and the brains, the loyalty, the strength of labour, these have made us the first nation of the world. There has been only one real obstacle in our path. Not foreign competition, for that is an incentive, but the cowardice and stupidity of Governments. We possess an empire unrivalled in its opportunities for trade and commerce, an empire which, you would surely think, could not fail to inspire a statesman with great ideas. But what happens? We have a Government which thinks it has exhausted statesmanship by crippling industry at home in order to pay off our war debt as quickly as possible. Instead of setting itself to create more wealth, with the wealth of the world lying at its feet, it sets itself to dry up the sources of wealth at the centre of the empire. But it is no use talking. One thing a Government in this country cannot stand is imagination; and another is courage. The British Empire is in the hands of a lot of clerks—and timid clerks at that. We must do our best to get along without statesmanship at the head.
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.
But until our politics are of a higher order we can hardly expect the best minds in the nation to feel any attraction to a political career. More and more the professional politician, the narrow man, the man of the loud voice and the one idea, the man who has few instincts of honesty in his mind and no movement of high and disinterested patriotism in his soul, will press himself upon the attention of democracy and by intimidating his leaders and brow-beating his opponents force his way onward to office.
The consideration of this grave peril to the moral character of our public life brings me to my brief conclusion.