Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [258]
“The floodgates of revolution are opened,” bawled Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail next morning, but no waters poured through. With the Veto abolished the way was open for a Home Rule Bill which the Government introduced in the following session. In the event, the victory over the Lords proved irrelevant. Opposition to Home Rule merely shifted its ground and, in the fresh form of the Ulster rebellion, provoked a new and sterner crisis in which the existence of the Parliament Bill was immaterial. Ultimately it took a greater upheaval than abolition of the Veto to lift the Irish incubus off English politics.
Some weeks later Sir Edward Grey remarked to Winston Churchill, “What a remarkable year this has been: the heat, the strikes, and now the foreign situation.”
“Why,” said Winston, “you’ve forgotten the Parliament Bill,” and a friend who recorded the conversation added, “and so he had and so had everybody.”
On the morning after the vote in the House of Lords, the heat wave and the transport strike, which seemed about to become a general strike and to threaten a “real danger of social revolution,” absorbed the country’s attention. A chagrined peer could find “no evidence anywhere that the Constitutional crisis had agitated the country.” On the same day a measure of perhaps greater significance passed the House of Commons: a Payment of Members Bill by which M.P.’s would henceforth receive an annual salary of £400. It had long been bitterly fought by the Conservatives and determinedly sought by Labour. Non-payment was regarded by the Labour party as depriving the working class of the right to be represented in Parliament by men from their own ranks. Especially was payment needed after the Osborne judgment cut off the use of union funds for members’ salaries. To its opponents, Payment of Members marked the passing of politics as a gentleman’s profession and as such was “more disastrous” even than the Parliament Bill. It would introduce a new and “intolerable type of professional politician,” complained Austen Chamberlain. It would remove the “last check upon the inrush of mere adventurers,” said The Times, then owned by that supreme adventurer Lord Northcliffe, and it would encourage the “invasion” of unpaid forms of public service “now efficiently carried on by men who can afford to be disinterested.” For the patrician, free of pecuniary greed and partaking in government from a sense of civic duty, the point was valid but obsolete; society’s needs had grown beyond him, nor had he ever been disinterested in defending the ramparts of his caste. Payment of Members measured another advance in the transfer of power.
The next act followed logically: Balfour resigned the leadership of the Conservative Party, which he had held in the House of Commons for twenty years. His announcement, made on November 8, 1911, after returning from a vacation in Bad Gastein, caused a political “sensation.” Although a movement for his ouster under the slogan B.M.G. (Balfour Must Go) had taken shape, inspired by the insurgent wing under the influence of F. E. Smith and Austen Chamberlain, it had been expected that he would fight for control. But the final stages of the Veto crisis, the wildness of a meaningless battle, the preference of the Ditchers for gesture over thought, the rising influence of adventurers such as Smith, whom he detested, and the challenge to his own leadership displayed by the uncouth tactics of the Cecil scene, had accumulated in Balfour to the point of irritated indifference. Almost as a gesture of contempt he had not waited for the issue of the final vote in the House of Lords but left for Bad Gastein the day before. During his stay among “the cataracts, the pines and the precipices” he thought things over and reached a decision. He was sixty-three, his interest in philosophy was still strong and to face the