THE END OF LIBERAL UNIONISM. impossible, with any advantage, to
maintain under the pre- sent circumstances the existence of the Liberal Unionist organisation." If it continues, the central office will have to subsidise local associations which have "taken up a decided position on the question of tariff reform," and this is plainly inconsistent with the neutral position in reference to that question which it had been agreed that the Liberal Unionist Association should take up in the controversy. The Association being no longer homogeneous, but sharply divided on the one question now before the country, its work is done. To the Duke as President it naturally falls to take the necessary steps to dissolve the Association, but before taking any steps in the matter he wishes to know Mr. Chamberlain's views.
Mr. Chamberlain, writing three days later, says that he too regards the question raised by the Duke as to the future of the Liberal Unionist Association as one of great importance. In the first instance, however, he is chiefly anxious to express his " extreme astonishment " that the Duke should have arrived at a different conclusion from that which he has himself reached. That the President of an Association which " is still one of the great barriers to the adoption of a policy of disruption " should be the first person to suggest that it should be broken up fills Mr. Chamberlain's simple Unionist soul with amaze- ment. What has happened to change the situation in this way ? The main object of the Association is not changed. It was founded to prevent the return of a Home-rule Government. That calamity needs to be prevented to-day just as much as it did eighteen years ago. Why, then, should the members of the Association trouble themselves about tariff reform ? It is "not at present a party question," and no one but the Duke wants to make it so. Mr. Chamberlain's modesty is so great as to be almost misleading. Tariff reform has ceased to be the academic subject which on this occasion he is anxious to make it appear. No amount of agreement on matters not at present at issue can disguise disagreement on a matter of immediate political importance. When he speaks of tariff reform as " not at present a party question " he really means that the division between Protectionists and Free- traders does not coincide with the party divisions which it found in existence at the time of its first appearance. You cannot say that all Unionists or all Conservatives are Protectionists, or that all Liberals are Free-traders. But it does not for this reason cease to be a party question,—it only becomes a new party question instead of an old one. The difference between Protectionists and Free-traders is not identical with the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, or between Unionists and Home-rulers. But it is equally important, and comes far closer home. No injury that the setting up of an inde- pendent Parliament in Ireland could inflict on the Empire would be so great as the injury that the adoption of Mr. Chamberlain's scheme of tariff reform would bring on it. Consequently, those members of the Liberal Unionist Association who happen to be Free-traders are bound to consider what the effect of their remaining members of it may be. They have only to study the election intelligence to satisfy themselves on this head. In many constituencies the Liberal Unionist Association is carrying on an active propaganda in favour of what the President of the Association and some of the members hold to be a calamitous revolution. Are they to go on acquiescing in this use of the organisation because eighteen years ago they were united in opposing another revolution which for the present is crowded out of notice by the greater urgency, of the fiscal question ? The circumstances in which the Liberal Unionist Association had its origin are of themselves an answer to this question. Why did Liberals leave their party in 1886 ? Not because they had not at that time far more points of agreement with their old friends than with their new allies. The reason was that the one point on which they differed from their old friends was immeasur- ably graver and more urgent than the aggregate of the points on which they agreed with them. It will be time enough, they said, to go back to these other questions when we have defeated Home-rule. In politics we have to do one thing at a time, and the thing to be done at this time is to keep the machinery of the -United Kingdom unchanged. This is precisely the reasoning of Free-traders to-day. They find themselves at issue with their old friends on a new question.—a question exceeding in importance all those, Home-rule included, on which they have worked so well together since 1886. Their duty, therefore, is precisely the same as it was in the earlier year. The natural and obvious way out of the situation thus unexpectedly created is to dissolve the Liberal Unionist Association. That is not Mr. Chamber- lain's view. Organisations are justly dear to a politician who has found them useful, and he has no in- tention of letting any one of them die so long as he can keep it alive. Instead of breaking up the Liberal Unionist Association, he proposes that measures should be taken to test its feeling on fiscal reform. If the majority went with the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Chamberlain and his friends would retire. If it went against the Duke, it would be for him to " review " his " position,"—in other words, to get out as quickly as possible.
The Duke of Devonshire does not like being hurried, and his answer to Mr. Chamberlain is merely an intima- tion that he will take time and counsel with Mr. Powell Williams to consider the points raised in his letter. After this there is silence, so far as this correspondence is con- cerned, for nearly two months, when it is broken by one of the most astonishing utterances that even Mr. Cham- berlain has provided us with. " In the absence," he says, " of your promised reply to my letter of October 26th, I had ventured to hope that you had accepted my sugges- tion that the Association should continue to carry on its original objects without interfering with the opinions of its members on subjects outside the official pro- gramme of the party." Would not any one reading this sen- tence suppose that no communication had passed between the Duke and Mr. Chamberlain in the interval, and that Mr. Chamberlain had naturally taken the Duke's silence as implying assent to his proposal ? That Mr. Chamberlain should wish the public to understand this is intelligible. What is not intelligible is that he should have written this knowing what had been going on since the Duke's letter of October 31st. He must be supposed, however, to have deliberately brought on himself the Duke's reply. " Your promised reply," says Mr. Chamberlain, has not come. You know perfectly well, says the Duke, why it has not conic. "You are aware from the private com- munications which have passed between us that the delay in replying to your letter of October 26th has been due to an attempt on my part to find some solution of the diffi- culties" to which the whole correspondence relates. This attempt was not made merely in the Duke's own mind. It led to interviews with Mr. Powell Williams, with Lord James, and later with Lord Selborne. " I made," says the Duke, " certain suggestions to Lord Selbome, which he undertook to communicate to you and it was not till December 21st that I heard from Lord Selborne that you were not preared to concur in the course pro- posed by me to him." So that Mr. Chamberlain is in communication with the Duke on the subject of his " promised reply " down to December 21st, and yet so entirely forgets all that has taken place that he is able on December 22nd to explain that the absence of this reply had led. him to hope that the Duke was coming round to his view. A. conversation with Lord Selborne must have a strangely Lethe-like influence for all recollec- tion of it to have passed from Mr. Chamberlain's mind within a day or two of its taking place. During the whole period between October 31st and December 22nd his mind has been a blank to everything except the looked-for letter. All the communications through third persons have made no impression upon him. He writes on December 22nd as though the Duke had maintained unbroken and discourteous silence for the whole period.
The two proposals which finally emerge from this corre-' spondence are highly characteristic of their respective authors. We can no longer work together, says the Duke of Devonshire, because your agitation has made it certain that the issue before the country at the next Election will be that of Protection against Free-trade. The result of the introduction of this new controversy is that " the differences between us are certainly not less vital or urgent, as questions of practical politics, than those which separated us from Mr. Gladstone in 1886." We can no longer work together, because we are no longer of one mind on the single issue which now interests Englishmen. But there is no reason why the Association should not be dissolved " with as little recrimination or bitterness as may be possible." This is not at all Mr. Chamberlain's view. He believes the exist- ence of the Association to be " still necessary to the success of the Unionist cause,"—including, possibly, the success of a certain Unionist statesman in the conversion of the country to his fiscal policy. All it wants to make it an admirable instrument for this purpose is the application of a Chamberlain purge, to be applied through a meeting called by himself. Under the beneficent action of this admirable remedy the Duke of Devonshire and the other malcontents will be expelled from the Association, and all will go well—for Mr. Chamberlain.
Previous page
