XEL ASQUITH.
AT the moment there can be no question that politically the most important personality in the country is Mr. Asquith. For the time he completely dominates the political situation, and though Mr. Lloyd George may be more talked about, and may evoke greater enthusiasm at Radical meetings, it is Mr. Asquith to whom both his own followers and his opponents look for a decision in the present Parliamentary crisis.
It is, indeed, in Parliament itself that Mr. Asquith's strength essentially lies. He is, before all things, a great Parliamentarian. Mr. Gladstone once called himself "an old Parliamentary hand." Mr. Asquith cannot yet fully claim the first epithet, but he has already shown a power greater than Mr. Gladstone's for managing Parliamentary situations. Although he succeeds in this difficult task, yet he cannot truthfully be described either as a strong man or as a peculiarly wise statesman. Nor does he kindle in the hearts of his followers any of that semi-religious fervour which some other politicians have succeeded in creating. He succeeds because, by intuition or by training, he has acquired the knack of extricating himself and his party from difficult Parliamentary situations. In the conditions under which we live such a knack may almost be described as a form of statesmanship. The country is governed by the House of Commons, and the people who carry on the government have to retain a majority in that House. This condition necessarily involves constant bargaining with persons of conflicting views, constant postponement of problems which a resolute statesman would, in the interests of the country, tackle at once, constant changes of opinion, while maintaining the pretence of a continuous policy. From the point of view of the moralist the kind of success which has given Mr. Asquith his dominant position in Parliament is not the highest order of human achievement. Nor, from the point of view of the country, is it the highest order of statesmanship. Let us briefly enumerate some of the curious quirks and turns which Mr. Asquith has been compelled to adopt in order to acquire and retain his dominant position. Up to the rejection of the Home Rule Bill in 1893 Mr. Asquith was a steady supporter of that measure. Subsequently, when the Bill was rejected by the House of Lords with the obvious approval of the country, Mr. Asquith, like many other members of the present Cabinet, allowed it to be clearly seen that his enthusiasm for Home Rule had cooled. He even went so far as to declare, in effect, that no Ministry dependent upon the Irish vote ought to attempt to pass another Home Rule Bill. He has more than once been challenged with this very definite statement, and verbally he is able to meet the challenge by pointing out that, even if the Irish Members were to abstain from voting, the present Ministry would still have a narrow majority in the House. But everyone knows that this is only a verbal quibble. In effect, tho present Ministry is dependent upon the Irish vote, because if on any particular issue the Irish Nationalists chose to vote with the Unionists they could turn the Government out of office.
Next take what some people appear to regard as a detail, but what from the Constitutional point of view ought to be regarded as a matter of principle—the question of Ireland's contribution to Imperial expenditure. In the debates on the Home Rule Bill of 1893, Mr. Asquith, echoing Mr. Gladstone, insisted that Ireland must make a contribution to Imperial expenditure, and he supported a proposal which would have charged Ireland with a con- tribution of over £2,000,000 a year, whilst leaving her responsible for the whole of her internal expenditure. That was sound finance, and up to a few years ago Mr. Asquith stood forward in the face of the country as above all things an upholder of financial equity in public affairs. He has now completely abandoned this principle. The new Irish nation which he has agreed to set up is not to bear the cost of its own internal expenditure, and is to make no contribution at all to Imperial expenditure. It is to be a nation in name, but, so far as financial facts are concerned, it is to be a pauper dependency of Great Britain. To reconcile this position with the position which Mr. Asquith took up in 1893 is absolutely impossible. His change of attitude is due to his Parliamentary sense—to his willingness, that is to say, to subordinate any principles he may have laid down, or might be inclined to adopt, to the Parliamentary exigencies of the moment.
These are examples of definite changes of opinion for which no moral defence can be offered. In other matters Mr. Asquith's success in handling Parliament must be attributed rather to an easy-going indifference than to a conscious change of attitude. For example, when his Old-Age Pensions Act of 1908 was first laid before Parlia- ment, Mr. Asquith was emphatic that the expenditure was not to exceed £6,000,000 a year, but it has now reached, as the Spectator insisted at the time that it would, nearly £13,000,000 a year, and there has been no attempt, as far as the public knows, on the part of the Prime Minister to check that enormous increase.
This neglect is all the more striking because, as we said above, Mr. Asquith gained his reputation as a sound financier, and the country does owe him much gratitude for what he has accomplished in the realm of sound finance. When he became Chancellor of the Exchequer he introduced a spirit of economy that had certainly been absent under the control of his predecessors, and has unfortunately been even more absent under the control of his successor. In particular, he abandoned the uneconomical system of meeting portions of military and naval expenditure out of loan money. That system is vicious, not because there is anything wrong in principle in raising a loan to meet a form of expenditure which will benefit future years, but because in practice expenditure met out of loan is always on a more lavish and more reckless scale than expenditure met out of the revenue of the year. We are still reaping the benefits of this action on Mr. Asquith's part in a more rapid reduction of the National Debt than would have been possible if the practice of borrowing instituted by previous Governments had continued. Yet, though Mr. Asquith during the short period he WAS at the Exchequer did effect much in the interests of national economy, he has, as Prime Minister—and it must be remembered that the Prime Minister is also the First Lord of the Treasury— permitted his subordinate to play ducks and drakes with the national fmances. All the economies accumulated by Mr. Asquith as Chancellor of the Exchequer have been swept away by Mr. Asquith as Prime Minister.
Here, again, the secret of his action lies in the policy of drift. It was comparatively easy for him in the first few years of the Liberal triumph after 1906 to adopt a policy of economy, for the Liberals had got into power on that cry. But the moment Mr. Lloyd George appeared with a new policy of social reform, specially adapted to catch the votes of electors who pay no direct taxes, Mr. Asquith allowed all his old convictions to go by the board and gave a free hand to his spendthrift Chancellor. This tolerance towards his colleagues is an essential part of the Asquithian method of political management. Never before have members of a Cabinet been allowed such a free hand as they have under Mr. _Asquith's Premiership. In previous Ministries it was a rule of honour that all Ministers should agree in public, however much they might dispute in private ; but Mr. Asquith permits his colleagues and subordinates to say what they- like on the platform, and it even appears to give him a peculiar pleasure to exercise his brain in devising ingenious verbal explanations of the entire divergence between the views expressed, say, by Mr. Winston Churchill and by Mr. Lloyd George, and those for which he, as Premier, has made himself responsible. Possibly this tolerant method has helped to keep the Cabinet together ; and if that be the sole ideal of a Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith's Premiership must be pronounced a success. But the mass of Englishmen do not regard this political finesse, this clever Parlia- mentary management, as the height of statesmanship. They feel suspicious of it, and their suspicion is justified by hard facts. It is only necessary to give one example. In order to meet the Parliamentary situation which arose in 1910, when the Liberal Party found them.. selves dependent on the Irish vote, Mr. Asquith decided to bring in a Home Rule Bill, although in the election of 1910 he had not even mentioned Home Rule in his election address, and although he had evaded that issue in his election campaign. Since the Bill had to satisfy Mr. Redmond, it necessarily dissatisfied Ulster, and for two years Mr. Asquith continued to defend the Bill as it stood, and, so far as definite action was concerned, to ignore Ulster's opposition. The necessary consequence was that the people of Ulster took up arms to defend themselves against transference to alien rule. When at last the threat of civil war has become so serious that even a politician whose eyes are permanently fixed on the House of Commons can no longer pretend to ignore the Ulster danger, Mr. Asquith comes forward and makes proposals for averting the threatened disaster by conceding to Ulster a part of what he ought to have conceded at the very outset. This is not statesmanship ; it is Parlia- mentary craftsmanship. It ignores the really important national issues in order to concentrate attention on the balance of forces in the House of Commons.
The result is, even according to the judgment of Mr Asquith's own supporters in the Press, grave injury to the nation. There is not a Liberal paper which has not been preaching for months past on the injury done to England and to the Empire by the action of Ulster in threatening civil war. Yet Mr. Asquith, by making the offer which he now has made, has in effect confessed that that action was justified. Mr. Asquith will probably go down to history as a supremely successful Parliamentary leader, perhaps the most successful ever known, but the historian will also add that he sacrificed the true interests of his country to maintain a majority in the House of Commons.
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