Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [255]
Once more a meeting was called at Lansdowne House in an effort to arrive at a concerted policy between Hedgers and Ditchers. Curzon had now come around to Balfour’s view but old Lord Halsbury grimly maintained he “would divide, even if alone, rather than surrender.” Balfour was urged to call another meeting of the Shadow Cabinet but he was becoming irritated and impatient with the “theatrical” attitude of the Die-hards, especially of the commoners such as Smith and Chamberlain. The most he would do was to write a public letter to The Times addressed to a “perplexed peer” advising the necessity of passing the Bill. The Ditchers replied that the Bill would establish Single Chamber government and they could not absolve themselves from responsibility “for a contemplated revolution merely by abstention.” As the climax of their campaign they organized a great banquet in honor of Lord Halsbury for which the demand for tickets exceeded the capacity of the hall. Amid gladiatorial speeches and toasts Lord Halsbury, appearing “very unwell, anxious and tired,” expressed the determination of his group to fight to the end and received a tremendous ovation. Lord Milner, whose “Damn the consequences” might be said to have started the train of events, was a logical addition to the company. Among other speakers Austen Chamberlain denounced Asquith as having “tricked the Opposition, entrapped the Crown and deceived the people.”
On July 24, the day when the Prime Minister was scheduled to make his announcement to the Commons, the Ditchers’ supporters in that House, led by Lord Hugh Cecil and F. E. Smith, organized a protest which culminated in the “most violent scene in the Commons within living memory.” All the anger and frustration of a class on the defensive exploded in a demonstration of hatred and hysteria. Smith entered it from love of attack, Lord Hugh from passionate sincerity. In him all the Cecils’ hatred of change was concentrated without the cooling Cecil skepticism so notable in his cousin Arthur. All his convictions were white hot. He saw doom in modern materialist society, in the turning away from Church and land and in democracy’s turning away from “natural” leaders. Tall and stooped like his father as a young man, with a somber, narrow face, he had his father’s habit of twisting and turning his long hands and looked and behaved like Savonarola. Churchill, at whose wedding in 1908 he had been best man, wrote that in Cecil “I met for the first time a real Tory, a being out of the Seventeenth Century.” In private conversation he was “so quick, witty and unexpected that it was a delight to hear him,” and in the House he held members “riveted in pin-drop silence for more than an hour” with a discourse on the difference between Erastians and High Churchmen. Considered by Asquith “the best speaker in the House of Commons and indeed anywhere,” he was in gift of speech as in opinions an English Albert de Mun.
Once when Gladstone visited Hatfield, Hugh, then a small boy, burst into his bedroom and hit him with his fists, crying, “You’re a bad man!”
“How can I be a bad man when I am your father’s friend?” asked Gladstone, who had not dominated a thousand debates for nothing. But this opponent was not to be sidetracked into debate; he dealt in finalities. “My father is going to cut off your head with a great big sword” was his answer.
The sword was now drawn against Mr. Asquith. At three in the afternoon, in a House already buzzing with excitement, with every seat taken and members standing in the gangway, clustered in dense groups like bees, and galleries packed with onlookers, the Prime Minister entered, looking flushed and a little nervous. Liberals rose to their feet