Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [225]
New men were appealing to a new electorate; were called forth, as was the yellow press, by the existence of a new electorate. People were more literate and to that extent more reachable and more gullible. The ha’penny Daily Mail had a circulation of over half a million, more than ten times that of The Times. Motorcars enabled candidates to reach a wider audience and the growth of cities made audiences larger. The force of the irrational was not necessarily wrong; it could just as well be right for the wrong reasons. It was not necessarily confined to what Matthew Arnold called the Populace, but the effect was greater because there were more of them.
When Arthur Balfour smoothly succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister after the end of the Boer War in 1902, the waves of change were already lapping at his feet. Business was good but competition from abroad was cutting into British supremacy in foreign commerce, moving into her markets, taking the lead in new industries. At home upper-class life was still delightful, but unemployment, hunger and want, all the ills, injustices and inequities collectively known as the Social Problem, were pressing against the ramparts of privilege in a tide of discontent impossible to ignore or repress. The demands of a new age were requiring from government more action, more imagination, more positive intention and measures than formerly. The Liberals, who now looked forward to their chance after ten years out of office, believed they could supply the need.
They were not a coherent group and never had been. Their dominant philosophy, as of liberalism anywhere, favored change and reform, but it was cut into by a thousand fissures of ideas and social background. In person the Liberals ranged from Whig aristocrats like Lord Rosebery to country gentlemen like Sir Edward Grey to men of business wealth like Campbell-Bannerman to landless intellectuals like Asquith and Morley to a unique and alien upstart from the Celtic fringe like Lloyd George. Some were Little Englanders who regarded Empire, in the words of John Bright, as “a gigantic system for providing outdoor relief for the aristocracy”; some were as fervent imperialists as the Tories. Some were Church of England, some Nonconformist, some Home Rulers, some unalterably opposed to Home Rule. Some were ardent Radicals dedicated to redistribution of wealth and political power, some were magnates of industry absorbed in making fortunes. Those who were Liberals from conviction rather than from family tradition or political expedient felt that between themselves and the Tories existed “a gulf as wide as any in previous time”; the gulf, as Herbert Samuel put it, between “the quietist and the reformer.” Filled with the zeal of the reformer, Samuel believed that the principles of Liberalism “are nothing else than the application to public affairs of the religious spirit itself.” Some Liberals were sincere, some were opportunists, some were demagogues, some like Lloyd George all three at once. They were the outs, eager for office, ready to answer the demands of a new time.
Their opponents were split among themselves, harassed by a series of domestic quarrels which had reopened since the Boer War with a peculiar vehemence. All the hatred and jealousy of Nonconformity for the Establishment blew up into a national tempest over the Education Act of 1902. Sponsored and largely drafted by Balfour himself, the Act added secondary to primary education as an obligation of the state with the object of making it available to all and of bringing all schools up to a