• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1254 0

as a means of drawing together the mother country and all its dependencies in a vast Imperial tariff system which would stimulate trade within the Empire and prosperity at home, strengthen Imperial bonds, increase revenues for social legislation, and, not least, provide an issue of which he would be the hero. In the British Cabinet he was what Germany was among the nations: dynamic, ambitious, conscious of power and ability, fitted in his own mind for the top place and galled that it was held by another. Tariff Reform was his usurpation of the office he had missed. It wrecked the Cabinet. Chamberlain himself resigned, the better to carry his campaign to the country. Five Free Traders, including the Duke of Devonshire and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also resigned. In the ranks a vigorous new M.P., Winston Churchill, waving the banner of Free Trade, crossed over to join the Liberals amid cries of “Rat!” from the Tories. Interminable debates raged over preferential duties, bounties, dumping, and other fiscal mysteries. The public, barely comprehending, took sides, Free Food leagues sprang up alongside the anti-school-tax leagues; the British people were rapidly becoming as contentious as the French.

As Prime Minister, Mr. Balfour, still suave, effortless, unaddicted to political dogma, refused to take a firm position, partly because he saw no firm ground on which to take one and partly because he believed a strategy of steering between extremes was the best way to hold his party together and his Government in office. He saw no virtue in a doctrinaire persistence in Free Trade and he could see advantages to British industry in some form of selective tariff, although he had no wish to swallow Chamberlain’s program whole. The one thing he firmly believed was that continued direction of England’s affairs by the Conservative party was more important than either Free Trade or Protection and this he was determined to maintain. Amid quarreling colleagues, resigning ministers, party apostasies, he eluded all pressures and coolly told the House that he would be ill performing his duty “if I were to profess a settled conviction where no settled conviction exists.” He infused the issues with such philosophic doubt and infused his doubt with such authority as almost to mesmerize members on both sides. When called upon to explain his relations with Free Traders and Protectionists within his own party he “indulged the House with a brilliant display of disdainful banter.” Exploiting all his parliamentary dexterity, he maneuvered the Government through session after session for more than two years, seeming almost to find amusement in the difficulty of his task. But the performance left his followers uneasy. They wanted the leader of their party to lead and instead, as Harry Cust said, “he nailed his colors to the fence.”

Balfour’s purpose, however, was serious. He wanted to retain office as long as he could in order to consolidate the Entente and the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence especially after the Tangier Crisis of 1905. He had given the order for rearming the artillery with a new quick-firing gun, the 18-pounder, and he was determined, as he explained later, “not to go out of office until we were so far committed to the expenditure that no Liberal Government could have withdrawn from that position.” Relentless, Chamberlain persisted in his campaign. Balfour’s dancing on eggs grew increasing difficult as the exasperation of his own party and the impatience for office of the Opposition mounted.

Overshadowing all was the Social Problem. Investigations and reports appearing all at once after 1900 made harshly visible the fact and the consequences of extreme inequality in possession of material goods. In B. S. Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1901, in the last volume of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, 1903, in L. Chiozza Money’s Riches and Poverty, 1905, in reports of the Royal Commission on Labour and in the Fabian Society’s studies of the destitute, diseased and insane, evidence accumulated