TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. ASQUITH AND MR. JOHNSTON.
NOTHING could have been more unsatisfactory than the way in which an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons, the party leaders, and the chief person concerned combined to fall upon Mr. John- ston, the Member for West Stirlingshire, when he made his somewhat crude criticisms upon Mr. Asquith. The ordinary party politicians in particular and the House of Commons in general always tend to lose their heads when questions of lapses or indiscretion in the exercise of their trusteeship are brought up in Parliament. Every elected representative of the people is, of course, in the position of a trustee. For a Minister, or one who has been a Minister and expects to be in office again, this trusteeship involves a specially strong obligation. But though the traditional way of treating such matters is bad, we -cannot remember a worse example than that Which occurred on Friday, December 8th. Everyone seems to have conspired to behave as stupidly as possible. One would have imagined from reading the headlines and the summaries of the debate that Mr. Johnston had been found out in some act of political turpitude and was guilty of the most shameful conduct. Yet, in reality, the worst that can justly be said of him is that he had made a bad blunder in manners. He let his ignorance, in spite of his good intentions, betray him into unmerited suspicions. Yet what man of common sense and experience in the world is there who does not know that such misunderstandings, though they may be irritating and reprehensible, are not crimes at all and are never treated as such by fair- minded and reasonable people who have command of their tempers ?
Before, however, we go into the details of the question, we must make it quite clear that we do not share Mr. Johnston's suspicions of Mr. Asquith in the slightest degree. We feel sure that Mr. Asquith is as free as any man living of the taint of corruption. We are certain that he would not consciously use his position of trust to further his own material and pecuniary ends. Though we think that he showed a fatal indulgence in the Marconi case and let his desire to stand by his friends and colleagues in a difficulty blind him to his duty to the country, we have always held him to be a man of untarnished honour, and so we hold him to be to-day.
It is, indeed, our confidence on this point that makes US so astonished and so indignant at the foolish way in which he and those who wished to support him approached the whole matter. In the House of Commons the various parties and sections rose like one man to overwhelm Mr. Johnston. They acted like a pack of hounds when, for some strange reason or other, they forget their manners and their duties and go off in full cry after a rabbit, or a 'weasel. or • some old villager's tom eat. On sueh- occasions, however, everybody, in charge of the pack, from the master of hounds to the youngest whipper-in, does everything he possibly can to stop this ignominious exhibition of mistaken zeal. In the Commons, however, all the leaders, including even Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, seem to have become as infatuated as . their followers. Instead of whipping hounds off, most of them cheered them on. At any rate, no one appears to have made any attempt to stem the tide of folly and to ask what the House was screaming about. The attack upon Mr. Johnston has a special interest for us, because on two memorable occasions we have found. ourselves almost exactly in his position. Just as he is attacked for drawing attention to what he deems Mr. Asquith's indiscretion, so we were attacked because we drew attention to Mr. Chamberlain's carelessness in the matter of his investments. Mr. Lloyd George, it may be remembered, raised the matter in the House of Commons, and insisted that the rule for Ministers must be that of Caesar's wife. His method of attack may have been in bad taste, and his motives partisan in character, but he was performing one of the proper functions of a Member of the House of Commons.
When Mr. Lloyd George involved himself in the Marconi business we made a stronger protest, as the facts required. In the first stages of that business we were told that we were doubting the honour and good faith of a statesman. To support such suspicions was intolerable. Public life would be impossible if such charges were allowed to go unrebuked., Yet now that the verbal storms have cleared away, most people, we think, are of opinion that we were perfectly right in supporting those brave men who, like Mr. Leo Maxse, risked everything in their demand for explanations and investigations of the connexion of Ministers with the various Marconi companies. No one now thinks that we did any harm by keeping our heads and asking for an inquiry.
Here comes in the most important consideration in this whole matter. It is preposterous to meet criticism, however disagreeably and vulgarly expressed, with vehement protestations about doubting a man's honour. Surely, all experience goes to show that that is the worst way in which a man can possibly meet an erroneous aspersion that is placed, or seems to be placed, upon his 'character. What happens in ordinary life when somebody challenges a man's conduct in some fiduciary or trustee position ? He and his friends do not strike their breasts and storm about their honour. They take the matter calmly and, if they are wise, even good-temperedly. One would have expected that, when Mr. Johnston raised his point a man of Mr. Asquith's experience in the world and long and fine record in public life, instead of being irritated, would have said something of this kind : "The Hon. Member who has raised a point as to whether there was not some dereliction of duty in my conduct has been unnecessarily vituperative in his language and subtle in his suspicions, but, at any rate, he was only doing what he thought was his duty, for I assume that he honestly believed his inferences from the alleged facts. Nothing can be so important to the country as to prevent the slightest scintilla of carelessness creeping in, lest public men should be suspected of using their official or semi-official positions for personal ends. Members of the House of Commons, just as of the Cabinet, are guardians of each other's honour, and it is the duty of each and all of them to be watchdogs in the public interest. There should be nothing but thanks for those who take the high view of their duties in this respect even when they are mistaken. Better a little over-anxiety in guardianship than slackness . and inertia. Therefore, I have no grievance against the Eon. Member who has raised this point, though I believe that, if he will listen to me with an impartial mind, he will see that I did not act corruptly nor even carelessly in this matter. At any rate, I am sure that, even if he has let his mind be clouded by suspicion, I can convince the House, as a whole, that his suspicion is unfounded."
Mr. Asquith, by saying some such words as these, would have put everything right and gained for himself the sympathy of comprehension. Instead of that, like one of the characters. in The Beggar's Opera, he must needs —here, alas, following Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Lloyd George—talk about people doubting his honour when nobody doubts it for a moment, and must overwhelm his opponent with a torrent of unnecessary indignation. such action ought to be left to those who have no case.
We are so much concerned with the general principle that we have left.ourselves little space in which to speak on the merits of the particular question before us. Mr. Johnston's mistake was that he put his questions crudely and offensively, but in speaking to his constituents last Saturday he appears to us to have taken a reasonable attitude. He told them that he had asked for an explana- tion in the House of Commons about the guarantee and was told that the Government had been impressed in favour of the guarantee by an important deputation introduced by Mr. Asquith. He went on to say that it was the Government that introduced Mr. Asquith's name, not he, and that Mr. Asquith had not denied a single specific fact in his questions. Mr. Asquith denied having any interest in the Sudan Plantations Syndicate which would profit by the guarantee, but he had never accused Mr. Asquith personally of having any interest. Mr. Asquith had declined to deny that there was any Asquith family interest in the syndicate. He concluded by pointing out that Sir John Simon, with his legal subtlety, sought to make out that he (Mr. Johnston) had charged Mr. Asquith with corruption. "He did not, and would not, oblige him by withdrawing a charge he had never made. Neither would he sit silent in the House of Commons or elsewhere while public money was being voted." That seems to us in itself not only a tenable but a most useful point of view.
If Members of Parliament are to be howled down merely on a point of bad manners when they show interest in their duty as watchdogs over the public purse Parliament not only ceases to be the Grand Inquest of the nation, but becomes devitalized. In money matters nothing is more necessary than the antiseptic of what we may call reasonable suspicion. No doubt such antiseptics, if used too freely, may burn and injure the skin or the tissues of the body politic. But that is a reason not for roaring out curses on the antiseptic, but rather for discretion in its use.
The essence of the matter is discretion. Though it may not save us from being misconstrued—it is much easier to misunderstand a criticism than to appre- ciate its true bearings—we want for our own satisfaction to say once more that we believe absolutely in Mr. Asquith's good faith and good intentions. At the same time we do, as at present advised and from what we have read of the business, think that he was by no means discreet in consenting to head the particular deputation in question. One would have thought that when he was invited to do so, the very first thing he would have said was, "No, that is impossible. I believe that the proposal is right and in the public interest, but I am the last man to be the spokesman of this view, for I have a son on the board of directors Thnugh that would not prejudice people who know me personally, it might, and indeed perhaps should, prejudice the general public. Another reason is that my constituents are involved in the matter. It is of the utmost importance that Members generally, and certainly Members who have been Prime Ministers, should not support sectional trade interests because they are those of their own constituencies. If every Member pushed the pecuniary interests of his constituency the country would soon be ruined."
That Mr. Asquith failed to take this view is, of course, no proof of any malfeasance on his part ; but it shows, we are bound to say, how slack Ministers and ex-Ministers have become in treating money matters. You can no more imagine Mr. Gladstone, when he was out of office, going on a deputation of this kind than you can imagine him buying shares in the American Marconi Company or condoning the action of Ministers who -did so. The fact is, as was pointed out so often at the time, that the vital issue in the Marconi scandal was, "Shall we have a high standard or a low, one in matters where the pecuniary interests of men acting in the position of national trustees are concerned ? " Unfortunately, though his own hands were unstained in the Marconi affair, Mr. Asquith preferred to let personal friendship weigh with him rather than the public good, and under his direction the House of Commons voted for the low standard.
It is the duty of all those who care for the interest of the State to restore the old high standard. There- fore, whatever temporary odium it may cost us, we refuse to join in the hunt of obloquy against Mr. John- ston. On the contrary, we express to him our gratitude for having raised what he thought, probably erroneously, was a case grave enough to be brought before the House of Commons. We trust that he will not desist from his watchfulness and that his political chief will think better of the virtual, if somewhat lukewarm, support which he gave to those who were attacking Mr. Johnston. But Mr. Johnston must remember that, when he raises these points, it is his first duty not to exaggerate, not to use violent or offensive language, and not to make insinuations as to motives. He must learn also to distinguish clearly and very strictly between carelessness, negligence and indiscretion on the one hand, and criminal corruption on the other. Small acts of negli- gence may no doubt fester into crimes if they are not stopped, but to misrepresent them is not only impolitic, but exceedingly unjust.
Previous page
