TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S LIMEHOUSE SPEECH.
IN a note to Mr. Harold Spender's letter published in another column we have stated our reasons for opposing as unjust and unsound the special taxes which it is proposed to put upon land in addition to the taxes which land already pays in common with all other property under the Income-tax and Death-duties, and also in addition to those very heavy local taxes called rates which are levied upon -land and houses, but from which almost all other forms of property are exempt. This extra taxation of land is, in our opinion, strongly opposed to all reasonable and fair principles of taxation, and is likely to be expanded to the point of confiscation. It is defended, not merely on the ground of expediency, but on the ground that the State ought to be the sole possessor of landed property. Therefore we mean to maintain our opposition to the Land-taxes as being injurious to the hest interests of the nation. We must deal hero with another part of the protest made by several correspondents,—namely, that we have treated Mr. Lloyd George unfairly and with a harshness which was not to be expected from the Spectator. That is an allegation which, if it could he proved true, we should feel very deeply. We have therefore re-read Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse speech with a view to seeing whether in the heat of controversy we had struck him an unfair blow, and with the design of acknowledging and making amends for such action could it in reason be charged against us. We do not believe it can. But since no man can like to seem judge in his own cause, we will quote a passage from Sir Edward Grey's Leeds speech,—the passage in which he dealt with the Gorringe case :— "Now I would say first of all of this business transaction between the Duke of Westminster and Mr. Gorringe that I see no occasion either for praising or blaming, or for regarding it as anything but an ordinary business transaction. The fact as I understand it is this. There was a property on which the ground- rents were comparatively small under an old lease ; that property had become vastly moro valuable ; and in the course of years there was a large unearned increment which accrued upon that property owing to the increased value of the neighbourhood and the value of the premises on the land. Now, Mt. Gorringe was a person who was apparently, at the end of the lease, paying that unearned increment. But he was not paying it to the Duke of Westminster at all. He was paying it to the lessees, who, having had a long lease on this property, had become entitled, while their lease lasted, to the unearned increment, and they were the people who were receiving it. I cannot tell you who they were, because, not being Dukes, they were neither famous nor notorious, and were anonymous as far as I know. At any rate, they were people who were receiving unearned increment. But their lease came to an end, and the Duke of Westminster, who was the owner, took the unearned increment,—in other words, did exactly what the lessees had been doing beforehand. I do not see what else he could do. Supposing he had said to Mr. Gorringe, I like you so much that I shall only charge you these few hundreds a year ground-rent which I have been receiving hitherto.' What would have been the result? Why, Mr. Gorringe would have been in a position to lease the property to somebody else and put the un- earned increment in his pocket. The fact of the matter was, there was a large unearned increment on the property which was bound to go either into the pockets of the Duke of Westminster or into the pockets of Mr. Gorringe. Well, so far as the business transaction is concerned, I do not see we need bother our beads about it. I do not know all the circumstances, I do not even know whether it was a hard bargain or whether it was not a hard bargain. All I know is this: there was a large unearned increment which had got to go into the pockets of one of these two men, and neither of them could get rid of the fact that there was an unearned increment. If the Duke of Westminster had said, 'I am not going to have it because it is unearned increment,' Mr. Gorringe would have taken it, or somebody else would have taken it."
If this is the true view of the Gorringe case, as we believe it is, then we say deliberately that Mr. Lloyd George was guilty of a crime against the best traditions of our public life in holding up the Duke of Westminster as guilty of black- mail, and we confidently claim Sir Edward Grey's speech as an exoneration of the Duke from the charge. Remember that Mr. Lloyd George was till four years ago a practising solicitor, and cannot be excused, as may a certain number of political rhetoricians, on the plea that he uses language wildly and vaguely and without knowing its true signifi- cance. Mr. Lloyd George knows, as every lawyer, knows, that the charge of blackmail is one of the most cruel and odious that can possibly be brought against any man in the transactions of business or of private life. We are far from saying that it may not be right in certain circumstances to call a man, whether Duke or peasant, who has really been guilty of blackmail a blackmailer. For one of the trustees of the national honour and guardians of public conduct—for such we regard Cabinet Ministers—publicly to stigmatise a man as guilty of blackmail who does not deserve a charge so dishonouring is a most serious offence. It is idle to tell us that Mr. Lloyd George did not in so many words call the Duke of Westminster a blackmailer. Mr. Lloyd George is well aware that the law never allows a man to shelter himself behind a technical excuse of this kind. We have to take the general effect of his words. If you say that such- and-such an action or system is blackmail, and then accuse an individual of taking advantage of that system, you have called him a blackmailer. In case, however, our readers may fancy we are exaggerating, we had better quote Mr. Lloyd George's actual words. After representing the landlord as saying to Mr. Gorriuge : "Here you are. You have built up a great business here; you cannot take it away ; you cannot move to other premises because your trade and goodwill are here ; your lease is coming to an end, and we decline to renew it except on the most oppressive terms " ; and after interjecting, "Oh, these Dukes, bow they harass us ! " and giving a misleading, if not actually inaccurate, account of the transaction, Mr. Lloyd George ends up : "A case like that is not business ; it is blackmail." If that is not calling the Duke of Westminster a blackmailer, the English language has no meaning.
But this was not the only instance of what—we admit somewhat unfairly to Jack Cade—we have described as the "Jack Ca.deism " of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We can conceive nothing more odious than the attempt to create prejudice against the owners of mineral property made by Mr. Lloyd George in his Limehouse speech.' After a passage of rhetorical fustian intended, though- we believe it will not be successful, to mislead the more ignorant portion of his hearers into imagining that there is something essentially unjust in private property in minerals, and after remarking that it was not the landlords who laid the foundations of the mountains, and that the landlord', "by some divine right, demands for merehy. the right for men to risk their lives in hewing these rocks eight millions a year," he describes his adventurous descent into a coal- mine. "The earth seemed to be straining—around us and above us—to crush us in. You could see the pit.. props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole- pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out' of hundreds of breasts by the consuming fire." All that might be a very good argument for not working coal-mines- at all, for forbidding men to hire others to toil under- ground. But that is not the way Mr. Lloyd George uses the dangers of the mines. He makes his pathetic- appeal only to emphasise the fact that men who aro: connected with such a wicked trade ought to he made to pay handsomely for the privilege of being allowedi to keep men at work in the bowels of the earth. His taxes will not strengthen a single prop or reduce by an iota the haunting perils of fire-damp or of in.. flammable dust. Mark, too, that he is quite content that, if a man is called a mineral leaseholder instead of a royalty owner, he should employ as many people as he likes to toil for him amid the bending and twisting and sundering pit-props. That, apparently, is a perfectly legitimate transaction, unless one happens to be the man who, for the convenience of the leaseholder and in order not to embarrass him by obliging him to find. a large amount of cash down, has consented to take payment in deferred instalments and as the coal is won. —Royalties are nothing but purchase-money paid in instal, menta—The dividends of coal companies have no stain on them, but the owner of a royalty, it is more than hinted, is a man who depends for his money on the terrors and perils of the coal-miner's life. Because the owners of those deferred payments object to a form of taxation which is to fall upon them, and not also upon other persons interested in the coal industry or in other industries, their objection is translated by Mr. Lloyd George into a contemptuous and venomous attack upon the poor, the old, and. the needy.; Here are the words in which he conveys his monstrous and utterly baseless charges:— " In the very next colliery to the one I descended, just three years ago, three hundred people lost their lives in that way [by fire]; and yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door qf these great landlords and say to them Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lides; some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won't you give something towards keeping them out of the workhouse 1" they scowl at you and we say, Only a ha'penny, just a copper.' They say, 'You thieves!' And they turn their dogs on to us, and every day you can hear their bark. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who, at the risk of life, create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand."
To create prejudice of that kind against the ownership of a particular sort of property appears to us a shameful and cowardly act of demagogy, which we shall not hesitate to denounce, even though in doing so we may shock Mr. Harold Spender and Mr. Mallet.
If Mr. Lloyd George, like a new Proudlion, were to attack property in general as theft, we should not agree with him, but we should understand him, and in a sense respect his view. 'When, however, he chooses to Single out certain individuals, and attack them because they are Dukes, or owners of leasehold reversions, or of deferred payments in respect of the sale of mineral properties, and employs all the rhetorical devices of the stump orator to make perfectly natural, legitimate, and reasonable transactions seem mean, cruel, and heartless, the time for dealing with him with kid gloves is past.
To such advocacy of the Budget as has been given by the Prime Minister in his speeches, or by Sir Edward Grey in his, we make no sort of objection. We hold both the Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey wrong in their facts and their inferences, and believe that they bare been misled when they assume that the possession of urban land is a good measure of a man's wealth, and therefore a good measure by which to assess a man's contribution to the needs of the State. They, however, plead their unsound economics and unsound fiscal principles without making unfair appeals to prejudice and passion. Let Mr. Lloyd George copy their example, and he will find us treating him as we treat them,—with all respect.
• If we were to quote all the rash and rancorous things said by Mr. Lloyd George at Limehouse, we should quote almost the whole speech, for it is all sown with recklessness and venom. Take, for example, his reference to our urban land system, which he tells us is due to "the fraud of the few and the folly of the million " ; his comment, "And these are the gentlemen who accuse us of robbery and spoliation!" his description. of "the landlord's sole function and chief pride" being "the stately consump- tion of wealth produced by others "; or his suggestion that it is something like blasphemy to mention the fact that doctors in a growing town get an increased value for what they have to exchange—namely, their skill— as the landlords do. "To compare the reward which the doctor gets for his labour with the wealth which pours into the pockets of the landlord, purely owing to the possession of his monopoly, is a piece of insolence which no intelligent community will tolerate."
We say again that when one of our chief rulers and governors introduces Mr. Lloyd George's controversial methods, he does an incalculable injury to our political life and to true progress, and that it is the duty of those whose business it is to comment upon public affairs to strip the hypocritical mask of moral self-righteousness from his features, and as far as in them lies to make it clear to the people that he is nothing but a self-seeking partisan. We are thankful to say that it is not only we who have noted with disgust the outrageous character of Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse speech. We have differed, and shall differ again, from Mr. Philip Snowden, for he is an uncompromising Socialist. All honour to him, however, that he will not take the ordinary party politician's view that as long as a man is working on similar lines to himself it is not safe or wise to criticise him for any of his excesses. Here is what Mr. Snowden—we quote the .Daily Express's quotation from his article in the Commonwealth—has to say upon Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse speech :- "It is'doubtful if the sort of speech which Mr. Lloyd George gape at Limehouse does his immediate object or his reputation any good. There is all the difference in the world between the freedom of an irresponsible agitator and the responsibility of an exalted Minister. The vehement attack he made on the land- owners would be appropriate to an ordinary propagandist, but from a Minister in charge of a Bill one rather expects serious argument and dignified controversy. Such a speech is in striking contrast to the respectful tone which the Chancellor adopts towards the Opposition, and especially the landlords, in the House of Commons. Leas revolution on the platform and more firmness on the Treasury bench would bring more practical results."
From our point of view, Mr. Snowden is, no doubt, a far more dangerous man than Mr. Lloyd George. Therefore, in a sense, it may be regarded as bad policy to praise him, and to show that he has the politician's best assets,— character and independence. This, however, is no case for policy or for any economy of truth. He has done a bold, a brave, and a sincere thing in speaking out in regard to Mr. Lloyd George, and he must have the credit for it. But though we admire Mr. Snowden for his plain speaking, is it not something of a humiliation that this spirited protest against the degradation of our public life should have come, not from the Prime Minister, or front Sir Edward Grey, or from Lord Morley, or from the Lord Chancellor, or from Mr. Haldane, or from any other of the more serious and high-minded members of the Cabinet, but from a comparatively obscure member of the Labour Party ? We are glad that the decencies of our public life should have been vindicated by Mr. Snowden, but why should he alone have had the courage to say publicly what not a few members of the Cabinet, scores of Liberal Members of Parliament, and thousands of Liberal voters are, we feel sure, feeling and saying in private ?
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