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By Root 1259 0

election headquarters in a Manchester hotel set aside fifteen minutes for his visitor and stayed to listen for over an hour. Weizmann was nervous at the prospect of explaining to the renowned statesman in his shaky English all the history and hopes, the divisions and crosscurrents of his people in fifteen minutes. “I plunged into a long harangue on the meaning of the Zionist movement … that nothing but a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms could keep the movement alive and that this conviction had to be based on Palestine and Palestine alone. Any deflection from Palestine was—well, a form of idolatry.… I was sweating blood and trying to find some less ponderous way of expressing myself.… Suddenly I said: ‘Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’

“He sat up, looked at me and answered: ‘But Dr. Weizmann, we have London.’

“ ‘That is true,’ I said, ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’ He leaned back and continued to stare at me.… I did not see him again until 1914.” Of the future Declaration that was to bear his name, Balfour said at the end of his life that “on the whole [it] had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.”

On the morning after his electoral defeat, Balfour visited a friend who for the first time in his life saw him “seriously upset.” However, he went to bed with a book, came down to lunch next day “quite rested and cheerful,” played golf in the afternoon and again on the day following, appeared thoroughly to enjoy himself and showed no curiosity about the continuing election results, “not even looking at a newspaper.” He ascribed the defeat to the rise of Labour and to the public’s desire for a change. Real issues had played little part, he noticed, audiences having refused to listen to argument.

Behind his carefree golf Balfour had been thinking. “The election of 1906 inaugurates a new era,” he wrote the next day to the King’s secretary, Francis Knollys, and the sudden emergence of a Labour party was its salient fact. It was the bid for power of a new claimant. In letters to several friends on this and the following day, Balfour opened his mind: something more was going on than the “ordinary party change.… What has occurred here has nothing to do with any of the things we have been squabbling over for the last three years.” Campbell-Bannerman “is a mere cork dancing on a torrent which he cannot control” and the full significance of the drama could not be understood unless it was seen in terms “of the same movement which has produced massacres in St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin.” His mind traveling ahead to the implications of this new development, Balfour wrote, at that moment of swollen Liberal victory, “It will end, I think, in the break-up of the Liberal Party.” More enlivened than depressed by the new terms of battle, he assured Knollys that he had no intention of withdrawing from politics, because “I am so profoundly interested in what is now going on.”

More clearly than most he sensed the beginnings of a transfer of power, not a mere political transfer from the in-party to the outs but one more profound, to a new class which, though as yet far from the possession of power, by its pressure on the possessors was causing upheaval in the components of society.

Meanwhile he had no seat. “I am certainly not going to go about the country explaining that I am honest and industrious like a second footman out of a place,” he remarked. A seat in the City of London being found for him, he returned to the House as Leader of the Opposition.

Others besides Balfour glimpsed in Liberalism’s victory the portents of its dissolution. To the Socialists this was the Marxian imperative. Robert Blatchford predicted that the Liberal party would try to carry out “a halfhearted policy in the hope of not estranging any of its moderate followers.” If they attempted really remedial social legislation they would lose the support of their capitalist backers, who would defect to the Tories.