TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THOUGHTS ON THE PRIME MINISTER'S SPEECH.
EXCEPT for the passage that related to the Home Rule problem and North-East Ulster, dealt with at length elsewhere, we have very little to quarrel with in the political programme set forth by the Prime Minister in his speech at the Central Hall on Saturday last, and in the letter to Mr. Bonar Law. Indeed, we may go further and say that. given the existing circumstances and given the lessons which the war has taught all of us as regards a hundred social, economic, and moral problems, we read the programme with a large measure of agreement. Even on points where we are doubtful we think it is quite right that experiments, and bold experiments, should be tried. But though we approve of the programme as a whole, we do not forget that words and deeds are very different things. What is really important in a political programme is the way in which reforms are carried out. It is comparatively easy to set forth great and far-reaching schemes of reform on paper. The difficulty arises at the next stage. That sounds hopelessly dull and conventional, and yet it must be said, for, like so many obvious things, it is just the thing which people are apt to forget when they are drinking draughts of the heady wine that we are all drinking just now. We will take a neutral example. We all of U8 agree that there is nothing more important in the matter of Reconstruction than transport, and we are delighted to see that the Prime Minister has had the prescience to put it almost first in his scheme. National wealth is based upon exchanges. The greater the number of exchanges, the greater the wealth of a country and the more rapid its material development—that is, the more easily are the people of a country supplied with that increase of all products of human skill and industry which they desire. But nothing so much facilitates exchanges as good transport. It is the blood of our economic life. While its circulation is free, healthy, and vigorous all is well. When it fails or is impeded the body politic is in danger. For instance, it has been often said, and said with truth, that in famines people die not so much from the actual absence of things to eat as from the difficulty of getting the food which exists in one part of the country or one part of the world conveyed to the places or districts where it is wanted. We have practically conquered famine in India, which used to be a chronic social disease, not so much by increasing the growth of food supplies as by developing roads and railways. If we are to get the real benefit which we ought to get out of our agricultural development, out of our addition of a million acres of arable to our cultivable area, we shall find that one of the best ways of doing it is by improving and cheapening all forms of transport.
Chief among these are our roads. The present writer remembers being greatly struck some thirty years ago by a Report made by the American Consul-General in France to his Government on the Peasant Proprietors of France, and as to the conditions which enabled them to live and thrive and to form the economic backbone of the country. The Report declared that one of the principal things that kept the French peasant upon the soil, in spite of the morcellement, or splitting up of the land into tiny plots owing to the division among the children under the Code Napoleon, was the magnificent system of French roads begun by the Romans, developed by Louis XIV. and his Ministers, and perfected by Napoleon's care, not merely for arteries for the Grand Army, but for the nerves and sinews of civilization. Owing to the large number of first-class roads, to their width and straightness, and above all to the absence of steep gradients, the peasant proprietor was able to get his goods to market with the minimum of expense and by the use of transport power which would have been quite inefficient in a country of bad roads. The peasant in almost every part of France has quite close to him a road so good that a donkey or the weakest and weediest of horses can draw his produce to market. Bad roads can no doubt be surmounted by plenty of strong, expensively fed horses or by high-powered motor transport, but they are a gross extravagance. What the poor man wants is a road so well graded, so wide, so straight, and with such a good surface that he need expend only the minimum of motive-power in his transport.
• We must not, however, let the fascinating question of road development lead us away from our point. At present all we desire to emphasize is that though the questions of trans- port are of vital moment, it is quite possible to perfoim, badly, or to overdo, the work of providing facilities of trans- port. You may spend too much upon them, or you may spend your money so ill-advisedly and so wastefully that the cost of providing the improved transport conditions is greater than the money which such improved transport enables its users to earn. When we say this let nobody think that we are speaking against bold experiments in the way of improved and better roads, canals, and tramways. We are quite willing to enter upon such experiments. We must, however. protest against the notion that you have only to say We will have better transport," and the thing will come of itself. In this life we shall not get better transport, or indeed better anything, unless we take the matter very seriously and put our best thought and our best work into it.
What is true of an agreed subject like transport is of course true in a still stronger sense of dozens of the other development items in Mr. Lloyd George's proposals. Though we are thoroughly at one with Mr. Lloyd George in thinking that every effort must ,be made to prevent wages dropping "to the point where the strain on the worker prevents him main- taining efficiency," it is obvious that there is mere a very large field for economic blundering and for the substitution of shams for realities. We shall not do the worker, or the nation, or the world any good if we increase the nominal amount of wages, but so lower the purchasing-power of the money in which wages are calculated and paid that the increase becomes a mere fairy gift. What we have to strive to obtain is a balance between the new wages and the new prices which will incline very decidedly in favour of the worker in the new epoch as compared with the worker in the old. We do not say that it cannot be done. We trust and believe indeed that it can be done, but only by the greatest care and patience, and by keeping always before our minds what before the war the Spectator somewhat vainly tried to call into remembrance—i.e. that the product is the thing. If we can produce more, and proceed by a geometrical pro- gression in production, then there will be little difficulty in giving the workers of all kinds, whether by hands or brains, a far greater share of the world's goods. But if we do not increase production, but are led off into the foolish belief that what is called better distribution is a substitute for increased production, we shall find the end is not a happier world, but one of economic confusion and ruin in which the chief sufferers will be, not the small minority whom we dub the rich, whether idle or working, but that vast majority of the population whom we now call the poorer classes. In Russia we have got the lesson blazoned for us in blood and tears, misery and death. Never in the world's history have the hand workers gone through a greater agony than in Russia, where economically the craze of the moment has been in favour of better distri- bution rather than of greater production. The extreme Russian revolutionaries believed that a new heaven and a new earth could be made by a forcible destruction of the lives and the property of the rich rather than by increasing the products of the earth and of the factory. We are not going to dwell on, or to view out of their true perspective and proportion, the sufferings of the richer classes, except to say that to cut off the arms and feet of a woman landed proprietor and then to burn what remained of her alive as a preliminary to the confiscation of her estate is not the royal road to affluence for all.
The real fact, the mention of which makes the Bolsheviks and the Extremists see red, is that there is not very much to be got by redistribution in any case, and nothing at all by violent redistribution, or rather destruction. The wealth of the wealthy is comparatively such a small amount, and so fragile in its essence, that its confiscation would add very little more to the dividend of the mass of the population, while its annihilation, which is almost always the immediate result of revolutionary confiscation, actually diminishes the amlunt available for dividend. Wealth is like a heap of sand which is always suffering a rapid attrition from the wind and rain. It is built up by a special set of men, but unless the piling goes on it is soon level with the ground again. "From shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves, it is only three generations." Indeed, by whatever road we travel, if we keep the real interests of the worker before our eyes, we keep the same goal before us, and that is increased production. Over-production, except locally and temporarily and of certain restricted articles, is the purest of delusions. The great world's stomach can take and digest all that we canput into it. Therefore we have got to keep our eyes fixed upon production. We now, as before the war, can crystallize our Labour ideals into a sentence. Higher wages, longer leisure (i.e., shorter hours), and larger product. Of these three the essential is of course larger product. Economically considered, the higher wages and the shorter hours are means, though vastly important means, to higher product, or rather to that moral and physical efficiency out of which the higher product comes. If we may for a moment say something which, half understood or unfairly misunder- stood, sounds base and brutal and ill-bred, but is none of these if we look at the problem in scientific isolation, it is bad farming to give your horses too little food, bad and unhygienic stables, and to overwork them. Under such conditions your product will not increase but decrease. There- fore in principle all social and industrial reformers should be in favour of a minimum wage and of shorter hours as means to the great end of increased production. But we must never forget here Burke's maxim that nothing absolute can be affirmed on any moral or political stbject. Though higher wages and shorter hours may be the way to that greater production which is essential, it would clearly be quite easy to increase wages and shorten hours so much by law that there would be practically no product at all. The plethoric horse which works one hour a day will obviously produce far less than a horse on narrow war rations. It is all a question of degree. When you allow the free play of economic forces to settle the degree you get a standard, but when you determine to give up the policy of laissez-faire, as we quite agree it must now be given up, the utmost care must be taken in regard to this question of degree. It is not a matter that can be settled off-hand and anyhow by a cheery word from Downing Street. Johnny Walker's genial optimism is all very well for a whisky advertisement, but it is not appropriate when we are dealing with the humming looms of a nation's industries. Let us have that amalgamation of the oil and water of Protection and Free Trade which the force of circumstances, and the Prime Minister's instinct for improvisation, have indicated as our safest, nay, our necessary, course ; but in Heaven's name let us remember the vastness of the issues at stake, and the need for a wise care in the application of our very empirical system of cure. Levity plus Empiricism might prove a deadly mixture. • There are a dozen more subjects in the Prime Minister's statement of policy with which we should like to deal, but for which we can find no space. We cannot, however, leave the subject without a word as to our own attitude. Our readers know what is our opinion of the Prime Minister's political character, and how dangerous we have thought in the past his levity of conduct, his impatience with those who disagree with him, and his want of that steadfastness and dignity of mind which are so valuable in the ruler of a great people. We can assure our readers, however, that we are not going to approach Mr. Lloyd George or his programme in a mood of suspicion, or even of sulky acquiescence. On the contrary, it will be our endeavour to find as much good as we can in his programme, nd even when we are doubtful to support him by every legiti- mate means in our power. Though we should have liked a different type of Ministry and a different type of Minister, a Ministry formed under some steady and equitable mind like that of the Speaker and representing faithfully every section of the nation, we are fully aware that that is now impossible, and instead of lamenting about what we cannot have we shall make the best of what we have got. Therefore we ask all those who have supported us in the past and have been inclined to follow our lead, to put their shoulders to the wheel and to give the Government, who are well-nigh certain to have their pro- gramme endorsed at the General Election, and so to obtain a new lease of life, the fullest and fairest field for carrying out their work. We must all of us think not of Mr. Lloyd George's past but of his future, and give him every chance to make good.
To say this of course is not to recommend any abandonment of just and reasonable criticism. It is very natural for Mr. Lloyd George to make platform epigrams about a blank cheque. The fact remains that all Ministers, however great and however responsible, are the better, not the worse, for criticism and for close watching. Reasonable criticism, and even criticism of a very drastic kind, is the life-blood of good government. The present writer will never forget what Lord Cromer once said to him in answer te an expression of indig- nation at the way in which the French Press in Cairo was attacking the administrative work of the British Agent and his subordinates. 'This journalistic criticism may often be very unfair,' he said, but we could not get on without it. We have got no Opposition here and very little public opinion, and it would be exceedingly bad for us all to have no one to point out our failings, and so help to keep us on the straight path. The fear that unless they are very vigilant and very oircumspect they will be shown up in the Press and have nasty things said about them is a great conducive to good work in Government officials.' In a word, Ministers are apt to get lazy and tyrannical, or at any rate self-complacent, if they are not kept up to the mark.
Mr. Lloyd George must then expect a full measure of criticism, and if he is wise he will know that-it is much better for him than the emasculating food of adulation. The statesman who sucks up popular praise as the sun sucks water from the ocean and gives it back in showers of titles, decorations, and terminal letters, is not providing healthy conditions for the State. The Prime Minister who will face and meet criticism rather than extinguish it will in the true sense gain, not lose, strength. Therefore, while we shall support Mr. Lloyd George in all that is good in his policy, we shall certainly oppose him when his methods seem to us bad or dangerous, and if he is prudent he will not resent but welcome such an attitude. As we have asked a hundred times in these columns, what is the use of a journalist if he is not a watchdog to bark and give warning of what he believes are approaching dangers ?
Previous page
