THREE LIBERAL STALWARTS.
BY REGINALD BERKELEY, M.P.
THE Liberal Party, in spite of the reverses to three of its most important members at the polls, and the withdrawal to the City and subsequent defection of Mr. McKenna, remains, on paper at least, the most formidable body of debating talent in the House of Commons. If Mr. Churchill, Sir Alfred Mond and Sir Donald Maclean had won their seats, as a debating force the party would have been wellnigh irresistible. Nobody else can lead an oratorical attack with the -dash of Mr. Churchill. Nobody else can expose debating Points, half-truths and fallacies with the nonchalant and deadly effectiveness of that master of passionless statement, Sir Alfred Mond. And Sir Donald Maclean is a great man for a forlorn hope. In any case, how- ever, a party led by that supreme Parliamentarian, one of the few living orators, Mr. Asquith, reinforced by the vivid personality of Mr. Lloyd George, and holding i as it does, the balance between the other parties, is assured of playing a powerful role in the present Parliament. But effective Parliamentary work is not only a question of good leadership or of emotional appeal. It depends upon elasticity and untiring watchfulness in debate ; and for these qualities one must look past Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George, whose gifts are rather in the direction of set speeches—something corresponding, if the parallel may be permitted without offence, to the fifteen-inch howitzers of the Great War—to the light artillery that can be brought to play with rapidity and accuracy upon any subject at any moment. In this respect the Liberal Party is well equipped—better equipped than either of its opponents. It has received important reinforcements to an already useful team in the advent of Mr. Ramsay Muir and Mr. E. D. Simon and in the return of Mr. C. F. G. Masterman. And standing out at the head of this flying column are Sir John Simon, Captain Wedgwood Berm and Mr. Pringle, on whom in their varying capacities the bulk of the work of their party will unquestionably fall.
Sir John Simon, to pursue the military parallel, is a composite weapon. He combines the effectiveness and range, and a good deal of the weight, of the "heavies," with the mobility and precision of a machine-gun. His learning and political knowledge have taught him to detect, almost before they are disclosed, the weaknesses in his opponent's case ; his great legal experience enables him to collect and marshal the relevant facts with inexorable logic ; and his masterly forensic gifts make it possible for him to reply with crushing effect at the shortest notice. These qualities alone would make him a debating force of the first magnitude, to which must be added a power of drawing distinctions almost Jesuitical in subtlety, a crystal clarity of thought, and a command of simple exposition the conscious artifice of which is not always appreciated at its full value. In the estimation of those accustomed to look for oratory • from men of public affairs, Sir John Simon.'s unadorned simplicity must bear about the same relation to their preformed concept as the Royal Reader to a volume of Gibbon. It is by no means involuntary. Long swelling periods may have the dignity of resembling the thunder of waves upon the shore. They have, however, this disadvantage : they are listened to rather for the sound than the sense, and that is why after great oratorical exhibitions the listeners are apt to exclaim " Magnificent ! Glorious! What was he talking about ? " Simon would tell you that he was dealing with facts, not emotions ; that, in so far as emotion was to be created, he wished the facts to do their work ; that the purpose of a. speech was to communicate thoughts or things ; that the speech was secondary and the subject Primary. All of which would be profoundly and undeniably true. A narrative is most telling when the style is subordinated to the story.
He has a rather -serious defect as a public man—an apparent lima of a sense of humour. Of irony there is an abundance, at times almost a savage irony. But one of the finest qualities a man can possess is that touch of irresponsible and irrepressible fun that bubbles out of your Roosevelts and Lloyd Georges and Bonar Laws and, as the saying is, "makes them human." There is something a little inhuman about Simon— not inhuman in the sense of being against human nature. but in the sense of being above it. He does not bring enough of the schoolboy into his relations with other men. When he smiles, he smiles tolerantly. When he laughs it is as though he were making a good-natured concession to the weakness of others. He has it in him to be as merciless as a woman ; yet there are few men to whom one would more readily go in serious trouble and with greater certainty of kindness. Like most great men, he is to be suspected of sincere diffi- dence, though the casual observer would say that was the last quality to be concealed behind the purposeful and seemingly confident exterior. His intellectual courage is beyond dispute : he resigned from the first Coalition rather than agree to conscription. It is perhaps a pity that occasionally he cannot seem to be just a little stupid, for undoubtedly his brilliance is a sword that cuts both ways. It makes mincemeat of his adversary's arguments ; but in doing so it creates an uneasy feeling that anything so triumphantly simple must be in the nature of a conjuring trick, which robs it of some of its effect.
Austere, refined, aristocratic, he looks out of keeping with modern clothing, and is most nearly common- place in a frock coat and top hat. In knee breeches he would be happier, but he would look his best in the powdered wig, coat and ruffles of -George-III., of the days of Fox and Burke, and Pitt and Sheridan; among whom his intellectual qualities would have entitled him to rank high, if not as an equal. The practitioner of plain speech to-day, because plain speech is the medium best suited to the humdrum routine and meticulous detail of the politics of the present, he would in those more spacious times, when principles and not -practicali- ties were the diet of the House of Commons, have out- orated and out-harangued them all. For the last -word to be said about John Simon is that he is a finished artist to his finger tips. L'artifice, l'artifice, et foujours dé l'artifice might be his motto.
Captain Wedgwood Benn is a lesser Simon with a great streak of genuine schoolboy fun as a makeweight. He has something of the same power of mastering facts, unequalled industry in collecting them, and similar gifts of clear, incisive speech. If his inclinations had lain in that direction he would have had a great success at the Bar. His quickness in seizing a point is only less remarkable than his skill in turning it to the best advantage in telling phrases. Perhaps his greatest Parliamentary talent is his affectation of a bland, almost beatific, innocence which, directed by his at times well- nigh unholy sense of humour, he employs for the signal discomfiture of his adversaries. Nobody who was present on that occasion is ever likely to forget the delicious foolery with which he drew out Sir William Joynson-Hicks on the subject of Mr. McKenna's attitude towards the repeal of the McKenna duties, at a time when that gentleman's acceptance of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer was regarded as an accomplished fact. Affecting to go more delicately than Agag, he lured on the Financial Secretary by an assumption of uneasy incertitude, only to stun the unfortunate Minister, when he incautiously emerged from his shell, by pro- ducing a letter of Mr. McKenna's emphatically stating that the duties ought to be abolished. It was the kind of dexterous sword play far too little to be seen in the cut-and-thrust cutlass work of -the average debate. Again, in a somewhat more boisterous mood, he showed excellent sport, and at the same time confronted the late Government with an awkward dilemma, when he introduced under the Ten Minute Rule a Bill to extend the Safeguarding of Industries Act to agriculture, sweetly reminding his tortured foes that fully seventy of their number, including Cabinet Ministers, had given pledges to the National Farmers' Union that such a Bill• should be introduced. He is light artillery, it is true, but definitely, in the " 75" class—more than a match for any other fieldpiece of the same calibre.
Mr. Pringle is a Parliamentarian of a rather different kind. The basis of his undoubted command over the attention of the House is his intimate knowledge of its procedure. It has been said that a man who knows the rules of the House cannot fail to become a power in the House ; and he has written that aphorism on his mind. Someone recently in one of the weeklies belittled his intervention on behalf of Mr. Cahir Healy. It was, in fact, a point of some substance that he raised, and one that hardly another Member of the House would have been competent to put The Speaker showed his sense of the importance of Mr. Pringle's arguments by suggest- ing that he should table a motion on the subject. Through- out the whole of the last Parliament, when he canie back after an absence of four years, he showed that in his enforced retirement - he had not forgotten the smallest morsel of his knowledge—nay, more, that he had in- creased it -He reigns supreme as the one unofficial authority of weight on questions of procedure ; and the presence of a member so qualified in any party must be a source of strength to it and of dismay to its opponents.
For the rest, has there not been created a new verb in our language—the verb'to pringle " ? " TO pringle " means to pin-prick your opponent until he tingles with vexation. His powers of Parliamentary obstruction are notorious ; though, unlike the former Sir Frederick Banbury, it does not amuse him to employ them against private Members. Mr. Pringle's target is "the Other Side," and into that target he shoots every shaft of irony, ridicule, interruption and interrogation that his brimming quiver can provide and his bow speed onwards. Warning to beginners : Mr. Pringle's bow is not to be bent by everybody.
There is, however, another side to him, to give promin- ence to which would be a little out of keeping in this article, but which must be mentioned to avoid giving a false picture. Behind the gibes and the jokes and the invective of that rasping tongue there are a powerful intellect assiduously cultivated, a keen sense of political realities and values, as opposed to the fictions of the Parliamentary game, a withering impatience of what he once audibly qualified as " tosh," and a great desire that his party should succeed in constructive statesman- ship. Probably few historians of to-day have a more accurate general knowledge of this country's political history than the " pringling " Member for Penistone. And there are probably few subjects, not only in the sphere of social reform, but in relation to foreign affairs or trade development, on which he has not got, not merely a general policy, but a detailed plan. The Pringle who is seen and heard by the public is the all- pervading occupant of the corner seat on the fourth bench below the gangway : the Pringle who is unseen is the indefatigable worker, toiling in the House of Commons library, in his room in the basement near the hairdresser's shop, at Abingdon Street, at his home in Putney, toiling incessantly for the constructive policy and the day-to-day plans of his party. To most Members of Parliament politics is at most a half-time job ; to Mr. Pringle it is an all-time and an overtime job. And it is this Pringle, the man of unwearying industry, the soldier-ant of politics, who will be long 'einerribered, when of the- ubiquitous occupant of the corner seat below the gangway all except his name is- forgotten.
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