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
of the more noisome of the politicians out of the earth in which he had
taken refuge after a particularly unpleasant affair. The old fellow
had watched the process with an active amusement, and I think he was
grateful to me for having provided him with an entertaining day. He had
been watching from the gallery, but that evening, as I dined with him,
he warned me against wasting too much energy in such a pastime.
I assured him that it was no pastime—that I took it very seriously
indeed.
‘I know you do,’ he answered, ‘and that is just what I am warning you
against. The country is carried on not by these fellows,’ jerking his
thumb towards the door, ‘but by the general activity of its people:
that people is sound and will come well out of any ordeal.’
The war proved him right.
‘What the mass of the people do not do for themselves,’ he said, ‘is
done by a rather too large but very conscientious body of permanent
officials, underpaid, industrious, and exceedingly competent. The
politicians are only the scum on the top; they have very little to do
with the happiness or the unhappiness of the nation, and not much to do
with its strength. Even the points of policy are, as a rule, decided
outside their circle in the weightier financial world. It is a waste of
energy to draw that covert too long.’
There is a great deal to be said for the old boy’s attitude. But I
could not help asking him what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had
been faced with a Chancellor of the Exchequer taking shares over the
breakfast-table; for he remembered Mr. Gladstone well, and had for him
that odd half-worship which so many men who knew that powerful, short,
oratorical genius of a better past were smitten with. I said, ‘In Mr.
Gladstone’s time the Secretaries of State had more privacy than our
modern politicians, and their actions interfered less with the general
life of England than they do to-day: with the permanent officials far
less; yet you know as well as I do what Mr. Gladstone would have done
if he had found a member of his Government taking shares from a company
promoter over the breakfast-table.’
The old man answered to this that the standard was altogether higher in
his own youth than it was now, and that though he could not deny that
Cabinet Ministers’ present habit of taking money was a weakness to the
country, yet he thought it a small weakness. He added a thing which I
have since discovered to be profoundly true, ‘At any rate, it cannot be
remedied, and so you are wasting your time.’
In all the discussions—far too many!—in which I have engaged upon
this subject I found only one really enthusiastic defender of the
system, and that was a wealthy young Anglo-American who either just
had taken up, or was just about to take up, a place in public life.
To him our present way of going on had a sort of special excellence
peculiar to this country and worthy of Bacchic praise. He spoke like a
man who has come into a promised land, and he was moved to indignation
by my criticisms against certain recent events. He applauded a Cabinet
Minister who had just given a valuable monopoly to a company promoter
and then resigned, and accepted a permanent highly salaried post in
that company: for he repudiated any connection between the selling of
the monopoly and the immediate subsequent acceptation of the salary.
He was indignant that such a connection should be dreamt of. They were
separate acts.
First the politician, in his capacity of public servant, honestly
weighing all the pros and cons, decides that a company promoter is the
right man to have a great public monopoly—worth millions. He gives him
that monopoly. There the matter ends.
Then begins quite another set of actions. The politician as a private
individual accepts a highly salaried post in the pay of the said
company promoter and lives on the profits of the monopoly.
Only insane suspicion could connect the two acts.
It was a startling theory to hear: it was also completely new to me.
But it had this advantage: it made him a contented supporter of that
which others either laughed at cynically or held their tongues about.
I shall be interested to see, as I grow older, whether this type of
defence develops, and whether we shall find the taking of bribes and
the levying of blackmail a matter, not for commonplace acceptance,
but for indignant praise. I do not think that we shall have much of
that argument. It is exotic. No man of our blood is really comfortable
in the presence of financial corruption. He may tolerate it: he may
practise it; but it does not fit in with his conscience, still less
excite his enthusiasm.
However, one never knows. There are very vile commercial transactions
which certainly excite admiration to-day as surely as they would have
excited in our fathers the determination to hang the culprit. Laxity in
the relations between men and women which our fathers would at least
have condemned is to-day not so much condoned as defended and made
into a sort of religion. Direct treason in time of war merits a few
months in the second division. So it is on the cards that I shall live
to hear men say in awestruck tones, ‘What a fellow Binks is! The Prime
Minister’s agent offered him ten thousand pounds to clear out, but he
got one hundred thousand pounds in solid cash before he had done with
him. He frightened the old fool to death by showing he knew all about
Chapel Street.’
After all, I have heard much the same tone of religious veneration in
those describing some stock-exchange swindle of our day, and a fortune
made in a few weeks by the deception of the multitude and the ruin of a
thousand families.
So there is still hope.
The authority and prestige of Parliament have sunk like water in a
river lock, sogging away rapidly before our eyes.
The process should normally have been more rapid, and the ultimate
crisis to which it should surely lead was due to come long before this.
It would have been much better for the country if it _had_ so come. The
Marconi scandal was an excellent opportunity for an explosion and a
thorough clearing of the air. The far worse Dope scandal, taking place
when the nation was fighting for its life, was perhaps the last chance
offered. If half a dozen of the politicians and company promoters
compromised in the Dope scandal had been openly tried and sent to penal
servitude during the war, we should have been the better for it to-day.
Instead of that the whole thing was hushed up, and the loot remained in
the hands of the looters: an example followed by I know not how many
others in the short seven years which have elapsed since that worst of
abominations was condoned.
Perhaps the strongest brake that was put upon the pace downhill, the
strongest force restraining a final collapse, and thereby condemning
the country to the gradual and certain extinction of Parliamentary
authority, lay in the momentum of the old Parliamentary prestige.
To an older generation, of whom some few survive, the idea of a seat in
Parliament was connected with honour and a social position worthy of
ambition. That generation carried on an admixture of the old tradition
which only slowly died, and while it lasted supported the collapsing
fabric with which it was intertwined.
Such men, before the present nastiness began, had already acquired a
habit of the House of Commons, they lived in the thoughts and customs
of an older and much better time, and lent to the diseased institution
of their age the memories of its health during their own early youth
and manhood.
Some very few still survive to lend the corruption of professional
politicians a remnant of moral support. When they are gone we shall
have the problem to face in full as we have not yet had to face it.
Of those men who had thus obtained a habit of the House of Commons,
as it were, and who for long lent it a fictitious value which it had
long ceased to possess, I would particularly recall—for I followed
his public action closely and often discussed it with him—Sir Charles
Dilke.
He belonged, of course, to an older time, when politics were still
respectable and even dignified, and, having begun to take root in them
much earlier in life, he felt acutely the wastage of his powers—for
he could never have office. But he was treated by the Chair as a sort
of Elder Statesman, and I shall always remember the solidity and
detail of his experience in foreign affairs. He was one of the very
few men of my time (overlapping from an older time) who knew what he
was talking about when he discussed the Continent, and who followed
the change which was taking place over all Western Europe; and he
could value the degree and the quality of it in each country, or at
least in the Germanies, in France, in Italy, and in Belgium. Spain he
discussed less, and I do not know what his measure of acquaintance was
with Spanish affairs. I always count his evidence as valuable in the
interesting discussion upon the origin of Gambetta. He knew Gambetta
well, and did not despise him. He said that he was a Jew, and that,
therefore, he was quite alien to the French temper. That, of course,
was also the thesis of many of Gambetta’s enemies (for Liberals
always seem to think that they are saying something unpleasant about
a man when they say that he is of Jewish race), but it was not the
testimony of most of his friends. Two of Gambetta’s friends I knew well
enough: one was a relative of mine, the other was that very great man,
Déroulède. I do not think Déroulède was a very accurate observer, but
at any rate he testified to the intensely national quality of Gambetta,
and swore that there was nothing Oriental about him at all. My own
relative, who was of a more cynical temper, said that he was certain of
the same thing from careful observation. Gambetta seems to have been a
man who commanded real and profound affection, but his legend will be
distorted, for it is one of the curses of the modern political chaos
that those who by accident or by their desire enter its whirlpool of
personal competition and consequent advertisement must inevitably be
betrayed by fate. Not one of them can appear as he is, and not one of
them will ever be taken by posterity to have anything of greatness
about him, however great he may be, unless he can exercise some talent
outside the wretched parliamentary business into which he has been
caught up.
There is in that life such an admixture of violence, cunning, and
bombast, quite apart from the money taint, that a man’s name becomes
a mere label for hatred and ridicule in places where the struggle is
taken seriously, as it is in France or in Ireland. It becomes a mere
label for play-acting and make-believe in a country such as ours, where
politics are not taken seriously.
No English Parliamentarian could suffer the legacy of hatred,
virulent contempt, and documented, detailed, evidenced accusation
which will prevent the name of Gambetta from taking an honourable
place in history. But, on the other hand, no English politician,
since the nineties, will cut any figure for posterity unless he can
do something outside his profession. There is nothing to prevent the
Postmaster-General, or the Leader of the Opposition, or any other of
the circus, from writing a good poem, or painting a good picture; but,
unless he does something of the sort, his name will only be one of a
hundred names, half comic and all wearisome. For the trade has lost its
dignity. It is found out.
I have delayed on this subject too long. It is public property, and
filth at that, and people are tired of it, for in their heart of hearts
they know that nothing more can be done, that public life in its
Parliamentary form is past saving.