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By Root 1325 0

interests, he was prepared to fight his way up by intelligence, audacity, driving ambition and sheer gall. When he stood up to speak for the first time in the House of Commons amid the dispirited remnants of the Tory debacle, members saw “a young man, elaborately dressed, slim and clean-shaven with a long hatchet face, scornful eye and hair oiled and smooth.” Standing with his hands in his pockets and a look of contempt on his face, he began in a suave, self-assured voice a speech of “brilliant insolence and invective.” It was so biting in tone and practiced in delivery that listeners hardly noticed the lack of subject matter. The speech was a series of sneers, sarcasm and personal allusion tossed into Liberal laps like firecrackers. The Tories sat up, startled and delighted. When the speaker quoted a slightly twisted version of Lloyd George’s electioneering reference to Chinese slavery on the hills of Wales and Lloyd George interrupted from the Front Bench “I did not say that,” Smith was undaunted. “Anticipating a temporary lapse of memory,” he said smoothly, “I have in my hand the Manchester Guardian of January 16,” and after reading the quoted remark, added with thrilling insolence, “I would rather accept the word of its reporter than that of the right honorable gentleman.”

The whole performance was a triumph of calculated purpose. Smith saw that what was needed at that moment was attack to give heart to the defeated side. From then on he was a growing power. Lacking the keel of a considered philosophy of government, he traveled fast but without direction. His brains were as notable as Lansdowne’s manners; they went to his head, said Margot Asquith. Ideas and principles did not interest him but only the play of material forces, and he was supremely confident of his ability to manipulate them. A legend later went the rounds that when he was at Oxford he and Sir John Simon had tossed to decide which party each should join since no party could contain them both. While probably untrue, the fact that it was told and considered apt was indicative. After one of Churchill’s speeches addressed to the labour vote, Smith said publicly, “The Socialists had better not cheer the name of Mr. Churchill for he will most likely steal their clothes when they go bathing—if they do bathe, which I doubt.” It was a sneer of an unforgivable kind and one which meant a new kind of man was on his way up. Churchill’s retort, “Mr. Smith is invariably vulgar,” did not prevent them from becoming the best of friends.

Change of government re-established the terms of an old conflict. When the Liberals held the Commons, the Conservatives, if they felt really threatened, could fall back on the veto power of the House of Lords, as they had done in 1893 to block Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. Between the proponents of Change and the proponents of Things-as-they-are, between the policy of Reform and the policy of Hold-fast, another clash was bound to come, as Lord Salisbury had foreseen. Stating its essence he had said, “We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both Classes and Masses. This is especially difficult with the Classes because all legislation is rather unwelcome to them as tending to disturb a state of things with which they are satisfied.” When the disturbance became too threatening the House of Lords would balk, not because they were lords but as the reserve defenders of Things-as-they-are. Repeated use of the veto to block the will of the Commons would precipitate a constitutional crisis. “As long as I am there,” Lord Salisbury had said, “nothing will happen; I understand my lords thoroughly. But when I go, mistakes will be made: the House of Lords will come in conflict with the Commons.”

Balfour made the first move even before Parliament met. In a speech at Nottingham on the night of his electoral defeat he said it was the duty of all Conservatives to ensure that their party “should still control, whether in power or in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.” Asquith afterward saw in this a claim