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By Root 1199 0

the Licensing Bill. The darling object for twenty-five years of Liberal temperance reformers, mostly Nonconformists, who wished to reduce the drinking of the lower classes, the Bill was the Government’s election debt to the Nonconformist voters. It was designed to reduce the number of public houses by thirty thousand over fourteen years by canceling their licenses according to a fixed ratio of the population. Since the public houses were owned by the brewing and distilling companies, the Bill was strenuously opposed by the vested interests, not to mention the drinking public. Every property owner allied himself with the distillers; the Bill took on an aspect as sinister as Home Rule, as threatening as Socialism. Balfour declared it to be a direct attack on the rights of property and Conservatives responded to it much as the working class had responded to Chinese slavery. A special meeting of Conservative peers was called at Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square. The country peers, or “Backwoodsmen,” as they were known, who were never consulted on anything outside the affairs of their own counties, were summoned. Some had never spoken in the House, some had never even been inside it, and, mistaking Lansdowne House for the House of Lords itself, thought the Bill was being decided then and there. “Some of us … met each other fresh from the hunting field and were able to compare notes about the past season and discuss possible winners of the spring handicaps.” All agreed the Bill must be rejected, and “adjourned for a good lunch at the Carlton Club.”

In this case they had the country with them, as was shown in a by-election at Peckham fought on the Licensing issue. It turned what had been a Liberal majority of two thousand into a Conservative majority of the same amount. For the moment it was not popularity but the principle of the thing that concerned the Liberals. The high-handed disposal of the bill by caucus in Lansdowne House enraged them. In November, 1908, when the bill was formally rejected by the House of Lords, Churchill, “perfectly furious,” revealed in a private conversation that the Liberals’ answer had already been decided. “We shall send them up such a Budget in June,” he said, “as shall terrify them; they have started the class war and they had better be careful.” In fact the Licensing Bill had nothing to do with the class war, nor was it the class war alone, but the accumulating pressures of a new age which were the cause of Liberal discomfiture.

By 1909, the year of the great Budget battle, Liberalism had run into the realities of a world grown too difficult for the building of Jerusalem. The Liberal program was not winning the working class. On the contrary Labour and Liberals were drawing apart. Labour, impressed by the extent of its own power as revealed in the election of 1906, was becoming more aggressive; strikes had begun again as soon as the unions recovered their freedom of action by the Trades Disputes Act. Liberals of the employing class responded like employers. No pact operated now, and in two three-cornered by-elections in 1907 Labour won. The victory of Victor Grayson, a raving Socialist, in the West Riding of Yorkshire raised frightening prospects. A former theological student with a gift for oratory and a fondness for drink, he preached Socialism as the deliverance of the poor with a fervor that swept through the mill towns like fire. His wild antics in the House twice caused his suspension and attracted attention all over Europe. The Kaiser was reported to have proposed invading England with an Army corps or two, proclaiming that he had come not as an enemy but as Victoria’s grandson to deliver England “from the Socialist gang which is ruling the country.” In cooperation with King Edward he would dissolve Parliament and re-establish autocratic monarchy as a feudatory of Germany.

Englishmen were increasingly conscious of the threat of Germany. “The danger now is,” wrote Lord Esher to a friend in 1908, “that in Europe we have a competitor the most formidable in numbers, intellect and education