MR. COURTNEY AS THE APOSTLE OF RISK.
MR. COURTNEY already sees a cause of possible weakness in the Liberal Party. At the dinner of the Eighty Club at Oxford he spoke of the loyalty of the Liberal voters as a thing that needs securing. It may be kept or it may be lost, and it can only, he thinks, be kept by a complete breach with the past. , The Liberal majority in the country is waiting for a lead, and unless it gets that lead it will grow languid and indifferent. Now languor and indifference, we agree with Mr. Courtney, are poor things to look to when a party has to be kept together, and the greater the present prosperity of the party the greater will be the disruptive action which these feelings may be expected to exert. Au enormous majority is a majority into which all manner of outlying voters have been swept. Many of these who voted Liberal at the recent elections had never done so before, and it is more than possible that some of them will decline to repeat the exploit on the next opportunity. At this point, however, our agreement with Mr. Courtney stops short. We are united in the opinion that the Free-trade majority will need some keeping together, but the rivet on which Mr. Courtney relies would be, to our mind, of very little value. Every- thing turns, he thinks, on the attitude of the Liberal Party towards disarmament. If the Liberal Govern- ment is to derive its policy in this matter from its predecessors, if movements towards peace awaken in them nothing but apprehension, if. speakers on the Liberal bench—Mr. Courtney did not specify the Front Bench, but it is probably doing him no injustice to assume that he had . it in his mind—are to echo the familiar Unionist cry of the necessity of preparation against imminent enemies, then the Liberal Party "will not have fulfilled the expectations formed of it when brought into power," and will consequently have forfeited that "permanence of power and authority "which it may otherwise hope to enjoy. " Permanence " is a term which can hardly be used with accuracy of the life of any political party; but Mr. Courtney may be supposed to mean only such permanence as is conferred by the holding of office in two successive Parliaments. Consequently his warning comes to this : If the Liberal Party does not make this country a pioneer in the path of disarmament, the Liberal Party will not be again returned to power. But even if this prediction is fulfilled, its utility as a guide to political practice is lessened by the fact that the contrary prediction is equally or more likely to prove true. If the Liberal • Party does not carry out the promises made on its behalf • in the other direction, if it does not show that the Empire is as secure under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as it was under Lord Salisbury, and a good deal more secure than it was under Mr. Balfour, the Liberal Party will not be returned to power a second time.
Mr. Courtney is afraid that the inaction of the Govern- ment in the matter of disarmament is the result of, a real • division of opinion in the party. Probably he is quite right in thinking this. Even before the division on Thursday night the reception of Mr. Haldane's speech had shown it. Beyond the general admiration of its form and delivery, two opposite currents' of opinion were plainly visible. There were those who felt inclined to ask with Mr. Courtney,—Is this all we have been working for ? Have we returned to power with a record majority behind vs only to hear the old reminders of the need of preparation against possible wars, and of an efficient Army and a supremely powerful Navy as the indis- pensable condition of this preparation. If this is all our reward, we shall know what to do at the next Election. To whatever party, or combination of parties, our votes may go, they will not be given to those - official Liberals who got them last January by pledges to which they never meant to give effect On the other hand, those who were reassured by Mr. Haldane's speech will watch with equal eagerness for the fulfilment of the prospect he held out to the House of Commons—the prospect of entire adequacy alike in the Army and in the Navy for the work that has to be done. If Mr. Courtney 'listened to, this prospect will be very imperfectly realised, and those who have been led by it to place confidence in the Liberal 'leaders will draw an analogous conclusion to that which he drew at Oxford. We have been assured, they will say, that we might give our Liberal sympathies full play, because the defence of the country and the Empire against attack lies equally near the heart of both parties. Now we know better. Now we know that Liberal ascendency means the choice between defeat or disaster in the field, and the avoidance of them by equally disastrous surrender, and with that knowledge has come the determination not to vote Liberal again. Does the existence of such a feeling as this promise anything in the way of permanence of power and authority to the Liberal Party ? To us it seems to promise just the contrary. The truth is—and Mr. Courtney deserves credit for facing it, though he does so in what seems to us to be the wrong temper—that the Liberal majority contains two warring elements, and that the effort the Liberal , Cabinet is now making to keep the .peace between them may prove unavailing. .What is not true is that the danger of losing Liberal votes is only formidable if the element which succeeds in making its power felt is the disarmament element. It is at least equally formidable in the other event.
We are thus thrown back, on the substantive merits of the two policies, apart from any party advantage following on the adoption of one or the other of them. This is a result which pleases Mr. Courtney himself. He values reduction of armaments as a means of perpetuating the Liberal victory, but he values it far more for its own sake. So in a sense do all reasonable people. No one except a boy who Las just ordered his first uniform would maintain a costly Army, and a still more costly Navy, for the mere pleasure of seeing soldiers on parade or battleships in harbour. In what, then, does the real difference between Mr. Courtney and ourselves consist ? In the degree of confidence we .. respectively place in the imagination. Mr. Courtney does not deny that there is some risk in reducing armaments,- ., risk which it needs some courage to face. But the risk seems to him so glorious that Englishmen ought not to shrink from it. In the matter of military preparations he considers, as in the matter of Free-trade, they should lead the way, not wait for other nations to tread it with them. He is sick and tired of the picture constantly painted which presents the civilised nations of Europe as so many predatory hordes only waiting for an opportunity to plunder. That is not, he thinks, their real temper. They are in alarm of one another, it is true, but that alarm will disappear, at all events as regards Britain, if she makes herself a pioneer of peace. In the same enthusiastic temper we can imagine Mr. Courtney ' enlarging on the amount of money wasted in insuring against contingencies which often do not happen, and urging some newly married couple to run the glorious risk of not ensuring the husband's life. "This is not a world of invalids. Health is not an unknown _quantity among us. On the contrary, diseases grow less fatal and the average of life is longer. There is the chance, of course, of the husband dying young, but why should this be the one event presented to our imaginations ? Why not think of the numbers who die at a good old age, and lead the way to the policy of keeping your money in your pocket instead of making it over to an insurance office ? " We do not for a moment say that the civilised nations of the world are so many predatory 'hordes seeking an opportunity to snatch and devour what is not their own. They are simply seeking an opportunity to get possession of what in their opinion ought to be their own. Germany at this moment has interests which, as she reads the facts, it is her right and her duty to assert. Unfortunately, it happens that these interests conflict with others which, as France reads the facts, it is her right and her duty to assert with equal insistence. • What is to prevent a similar cause of quarrel arising at the shortest possible notice between Britain and Germany, or between Britain and any other Power whose interests happen to conflict with ours ? The chance that something of the kind will happen is really greater in our own case than in that of any other nation, for the simple reason that we have a larger and a more scattered territory than any other Power. There is no need to credit other nations with a special vice. We all wish to keep what we have, and it happens to all of us at times that the addition of something which we have not seems indispensable to the safe holding of what we have. We have to choose between keeping ourselves pre- pared to maintain our just rights and to discharge our international duties, and finding ourselves committed to a war which at the outset we have not the means of carrying on. The latter position makes neither for peace nor for economy. It is not the well-prepared Power that is most easily tempted into an imprudent policy. It is rather the Power which dreads being taunted with its inability to maintain its rights against an adversary that has not had Mr. Courtney for an adviser. And if the maintenance of armaments is costly, there is something which is far more costly, and that is the improvising of them.
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