Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [247]
The herd instinct occupied two other investigators in 1908, William McDougall in Social Psychology and Graham Wallas in Human Nature in Politics. Wallas’ life and thought were directed toward The Great Society, the title of a book he published in 1914. With Shaw and the Webbs he was the fourth of the Fabian junta until he resigned in 1904 in protest against its support of Tariff Reform. A member of the LCC, chairman of the London School Board, a founder of, and professor of political science at, the London School of Economics, Wallas in his own words was “a working thinker.” He was described by Wells as a “rather slovenly, slightly pedantic, noble-spirited man” in moustache and pince-nez whose lectures, though slow and fussy, were “penetrating and inspiring.” To another student, G. D. H. Cole, he was “the most inspiring lecturer I have ever heard.” In Human Nature in Politics he examined the evidence showing that man did not act according to rational assumptions. His hope was that the new methods of psychology and sociology would light the way toward more enlightened behavior in humanity’s self-interest.
Wallas did not want to accept the implications of Darwinism which seemed to condone and accept as inevitable the native aggressiveness of human nature and to condemn mankind to ruthless struggle as a condition of progress. Yet he foresaw that, unless the irrational was controlled, nations would engage in a series of inter-empire wars until only England and Germany or America and China remained, and then finally, after a “naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will exist” and the inhabitants of the globe, reduced by half, would have to begin all over again. Already the process seemed to be on the way with “Germany and ourselves marching towards the horrors of world war” merely because, having made entities of Nation and Empire, “our sympathies are shut up within them.”
Lloyd George’s Budget of 1909 was the fuse, deliberately lit, of one of the great quarrels which made the Liberal era, in the words of a participant, “so unprecedentedly cantankerous and uncomfortable.” With Liberal prestige sinking, party leaders were aware that without a popular issue they might not win the next election. People were already beginning to calculate, Gardiner wrote, “when the election would come and by how much the Liberals would lose.”
As Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George had to provide £16,000,000 of additional revenue for 1909, one-third toward the eight Dreadnoughts to which the Government had agreed, and two-thirds for implementing the Old Age Pensions Act. He chose to obtain it by a tax-the-rich program which, while neither unsound nor confiscatory, was framed as provocatively as possible with intent to goad the Lords to reject it so as to create an issue of Peers vs. People. The Budget raised the income tax on a graduated scale from 9d. to 1s. 2d. in the pound with an extra supertax of 6d. on incomes over £5,000. (Already when the Liberals’ first budget had raised the income tax to 11d. in the pound, a daughter of the Duke of Rutland recalled, “We all thought Papa would die. He looked too ashen to recover.”) The new Budget raised death duties to a maximum of 10 per cent on estates of £200,000 or over, it added a tax on motors and petrol which at this date affected only the rich, and also on tobacco