The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
prestige. It is gone.
In the presence of these experiences, the commonplaces of Parliamentary
life with which all Parliamentarians are thoroughly familiar, and
which at last the public are learning, the attitude of the politicians
themselves is one of tolerance: the attitude of the public is a weary
and disdainful indifference.
This attitude of tolerance on the part of the politicians, this policy
they have chosen of excusing and pardoning corruption, seems to me more
worthy of discussion than anything else in public life to-day; it is
the centre of the whole affair.
Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government.
Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the
repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption. So long as
men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can
be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as
political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, for ever—so
long you will have corruption present among those who govern, except
under a strong king. It stands to reason that the appetite for wealth
or notoriety or both will incite men in political power to obtain them,
and as that power gives them in a large measure control of the courts
of justice and full control of the police and of prosecution, they can
be rendered in the main immune from the consequences of their actions.
I should not think it remarkable to learn that in any country, at any
time, there was very great corruption among the public men. What I
should think remarkable, what I should think a phenomenon worthy of
special study (because it would be exceptional and would necessarily
produce exceptional results), would be to hear that the corruption was
not punished, and that those who were caught and exposed in flagrant
acts of corruption were actually promoted. That is what we have here
to-day in England.
It is with the toleration of parliamentary corruption as it is with
disease in the human body. Hardly anybody goes through life without
some bad illness. Most people have some one or other specific weakness
which develops into a long illness ending in death, and all human
beings whatsoever are liable to disease, even those few who do not
for the moment suffer from it. But everywhere you see the human race
fighting disease, and trying to avoid its consequences. Now if you
found a man who took his disease as a habit, and tended rather to
accentuate it and foster it, you would think his action abnormal. You
would say, ‘Certain strange consequences will follow upon this.’ And
you would be right.
I have found the modern toleration of bribery and blackmail in
politics to be defended with very different arguments, but I fancy
that the underlying motive of the defence, the real basis of it in a
Parliamentarian’s world, is patriotism combined with a certain new
scale of moral values which has come in with the century. I fancy all
those who have in my hearing defended this later-day toleration of
corruption, really had at the back of their heads a conviction that
such degradation of public life did the country no great harm, being
no more than a sort of permanent necessary evil. They think that the
lessening of the security of the state which would come from exposing
and punishing the culprits a much greater evil than letting them go
their way. It is something of the attitude which most people take
towards a family scandal. They say: ‘These things will happen anyhow;
and we shall lower the family by any public discussion of them.’ So say
the more reputable at Westminster.
There are then, as I see it, two elements in the now admitted and
universal toleration of bribery and blackmail among politicians. The
first element is the noble element of patriotism which judges that of
two evils you must choose the least, and that the evil of a certain
minimum necessary amount of political vice is far less than the
evil of shaking authority and order in society and at the same time
weakening the country in the face of its rivals. The second element is
the judgment that the levying of and submitting to blackmail, and the
offering and taking of bribes among Parliamentarians is only one out of
hundreds of moral evils in the state, and is one of the least.
If these be the real foundations of the tolerance of these evils,
the artificial arguments advanced are many and varied. I remember
one political dinner table in Surrey where we thrashed out the whole
business at some length. Everybody present was connected with public
life directly or indirectly, and no one, so far as I know, was himself
or herself guilty. Yet, out of twenty, only three of us, of whom I was
one, maintained the necessity of checking the evil. All the others,
the remaining men and, of course, _all_ the women, relied upon this
argument: that what you wanted in the conduct of the state was ability,
sound judgment of the elements in any problem to be dealt with, and a
good forecast of the immediate future. If you had these, they said,
the country prospered; lacking these, any disaster might come. If you
got these qualities in those who governed, it did not matter whether
they were also given to peculation, or to odd tricks of spying and
threatening, or to selling policies and monopolies, or to taking bribes.
I think that answer would have been sound if you could have proved that
there was some necessary connection between good judgment, resolute
will, patriotism, and all the rest of it, and the particular vices in
question. For instance, a man defending the luxury and worldliness of
a religious hierarchy might very well say: ‘These are moral evils,
no doubt; but you will hardly get men able to conduct a great
organisation who shall at the same time be indifferent to pomp and
pleasure.’ But I would contend that in the case of Parliamentary life
the connection does not apply. The kind of man who advances by taking
or giving bribes, especially the man who advances by taking bribes, the
kind of man who spends his energy in ferreting out the secret actions
of rivals and then threatening them with exposure if they continue to
compete with him, is not the kind of man who will normally have good
judgment. Such men are, as a rule, of a very base sort intellectually,
and the vices from which they suffer are the vices of small, uncertain,
and despicable minds. If I wanted a man to manage a great business with
foresight, strong will, and a good understanding of the elements of
the problems before him, I might choose him in spite of a record for
cruelty or pride—two very detestable vices. But I should be unwise
to choose him if he had a record for petty peculation and perpetual
intrigue among his fellows. Men suffering from these vices do very well
in the lower ranks of the secret police, but they are unfitted for
high position. Indeed, we have had experience in the last few years,
and very rude experience, of what happens when you give such men even
a small part of the governing power in the state. It was such men who
judged, for instance, that the Jewish Communist revolution in Hungary
would succeed. It was such men who supported the Greek adventure
against Turkey, and it was such men who capitulated to Ireland.
Another argument I have heard advanced is this: that corruption on a
far larger scale was vigorous during all the lifetime in which England
was rising to its modern position of a Great Power.
From Walpole to the younger Pitt, from the South Sea Bubble to the
Act of Union, public life was conducted universally upon a system of
bribes. No one can deny that these were the years during which the
modern greatness of England was founded; therefore (it is advanced)
there is something quite out of proportion in fussing about a modern
Chancellor of the Exchequer taking a few thousand shares across the
breakfast-table, or a modern Postmaster-General signing a contract
in favour of some private company and then taking a highly paid post
with that company as his reward; for, if a very much more extended
system of bribery did the country no harm in its formative period, we
have nothing to fear from little individual peccadilloes in the way of
taking a few thousands here and there, as is the habit of our public
men to-day.
I fully agree that if the bribery were of the same quality in both
cases, this argument would be sound. But the whole point of the affair
is that the bribery is of a different kind.
The corruption of the eighteenth century was the purchase by those who
controlled honours (and in a large measure the public purse) of votes
in support of their policy; at the same time it was the open grasping
of lucrative sinecures and large salaries by those in power.
An eighteenth-century aristocrat would give his dependent a lucrative
sinecure, or a position in which he was free to accumulate great sums;
he and his would vote themselves an exaggerated salary; he would vote
out of the taxes great sums to his colleagues, and he would take many
private opportunities for enriching himself, as the natural action of a
man possessed of the power to do so through a public post.
But your eighteenth-century aristocrats who gave the tone to all that
system, the big squires of the time, and the great merchants whom
they digested into their body, were neither influenced in policy nor
lowered in dignity by what they did. They did not profess to be acting
otherwise, they did not put themselves into an absurd position, nor
live in panic of exposure. A man would take money or honours as the
wages of voting for the Government, but members of the Government
themselves would not habitually take money in order to advantage
company promoters who desired to fleece the public. There were
occasional examples of this sort of thing, but it was not normal. You
cannot imagine Walpole, for instance, or the younger Pitt, at either
end of the period, taking money from a chance financial adventurer who
should have come to him to get a new duty put on, or an old duty taken
off, or a new kind of monopoly invented, whereby to fill his pockets.
I cannot imagine a man going to the younger Pitt, and saying: ‘My
brother who is your colleague in the Government and I have a project
for fitting sailing-ships with such-and-such a device. If you will help
us to make it a law that all British ships shall carry this device and
purchase it from us, we will give you a share in the proceeds.’ Our
modern politicians act in this fashion; and, what is perhaps worse for
the authority of Government, they do so in a fashion which makes them
ridiculous: they loudly protest their innocence on the eve of exposure,
and live always in some trepidation, and in a sort of incessant
wrestling match with those who could make their lives intolerable by
public insistence on their little habits.
Here is, I think, the core of the whole matter. Those patriots who
rightly think they serve the country by strengthening the authority
of even nominal governors, but who are persuaded that the toleration
of political vice strengthens such authority, make in this second
postulate of theirs a very obvious error. It is an error which they
would not make, I think, if they lived the life of their fellow
citizens and knew the average Englishmen better than they do.
All politicians live a life apart from the general mass of the less
wealthy, less privileged classes, though they themselves are so largely
drawn from these strata. It is astonishing when one hears them talking
among themselves to discover how remote they are from the general
interests of the public, and how seriously they take their own sham
divisions and sham battles, and with what strange simplicity they
believe that these sham battles are of vast moment to the electorate.