Modern English statesmen

Chapter I

IT is one of the unsolved problems of history whether great statesmen rule their country or whether they merely register the desires and opinions of their age, their race and their nation. It is the question whether great men govern or obey. It is no answer to produce a royal proclamation or a chancellor's ruling, or even the statute book of an elected parliament. The fundamental mystery still remains, whether any man or parliament, however despotic or however wise, has ever made a people do anything that was outside the tradition of the race. It is the problem whether racial or national tradition is not altogether more powerful than the orders of the most masterful government that ever existed. Did Augustus order the Roman people to obey him as their emperor, or did the united impulse of the republican citizens order Augustus to organize them as an Empire? Would it not be near the truth to say that the people of Rome had already made themselves into a despotism long before they allowed Augustus to act so openly? Did the late German Emperor rule the Germans, or did he carry out the imperious will of that race? Were they servile to him, or was he servile to them? Did Chatham

I force the English people to build an Empire, or did he merely act as their organizing agent? Do statesmen express their own will, or the will of those who seem to be their subjects? The problem is put into the balance almost every time that we weigh a historical fact.

The question may never be answered in any absolute way : and this for the very good reason that there may be no conclusive answer. It is only the timekeeper and the drill-sergeant who have rigid rules of life. Nature, being neither a pedant nor a bureaucrat, has a happy way of doing the best with each case as it comes along. Sometimes the autocrat has his will for a time; and then the rising of a people will toss him away as easily as a wave tosses a cork. There is a continual giving and taking between a people and those who govern them. It is impossible to make a case for the victory of one side which quite excludes the other. Nevertheless the evidence would seem to point to the ultimate supremacy of national tradition — which is national will — over the will of the statesman. A governor can survive for a time; it may be that for a whole lifetime he may impose his rule against the wishes of his subjects. There are cases where a series of despots have ruled against the will of a race; but sooner or later, the racial command pushes its way through the weight of authority above. Nevertheless, the argument again (with the uncertain indecision of Nature once more) moves across to the other side, when we have to admit that although a nation usually has the power to overthrow an autocratic statesman — be he king or banker — yet, since there cannot be cause without effect, the nation that emerges is not quite the same that it would have been had it never been submerged under the despotism. To that extent the great autocrats win. But, again, in the final summing up it is probable that the effect of the personal ruler is as the blowing of a contrary wind against an ocean tide : it blows the breakers into whiter foam; it cannot stop the irresistible flow. A book on statesmen is, after all, merely a book on foam and not on tides. But if they are foam, they are the result of tides; and, to that extent, they are symbolic.

It is not generally recognized that the action of a statesman may be very spectacular on the page of history, and yet he may have done nothing but touch the surface of the national life. The vast bulk of human life, in a broad sense, has been almost untouched by the laws and ordinances declared by ruling men and representative assemblies. One talks loosely of despotism, but it may be very blatant and yet not go very deep. An Englishman who knew Russia under the autocratic Czar said that there was more individual liberty in that country than in England. There was probably a touch of paradox in that statement; but there was certainly more than a touch of truth also. For the greater part of its career the human race progressed without much of what we should call "government" to-day. Government is a comparatively modern idea; and to that extent statesmanship is only a modern trade. It is a trade that has been growing since the Renaissance with alarming speed; and perhaps already it is untrue to say that it does not affect the fundamentals of human existence; but it is only recently that it has become untrue. Even in the eighteenth century the Chathams and the Burkes and their kind could make mighty displays in the Houses of Parliament and yet have comparatively little effect on the lives of the citizens in general. They had scarcely thought of such coercive measures as Conscription Acts, Insurance Acts, and the dozens of ways in which the State now invades the Englishman's home that was once his castle. It is only during the last half-century that the modern politicians have realized that by cleverly drafted laws and a faithful army and police force they may reduce the ordinary citizen to a more helpless creature than a black slave.

If one gets away from the popular notion of the orthodox history-books that statesmen have been the chief driving force in our national life; if one can regard the whole scene of history with an unprejudiced eye; then kings and governors will still take a real and -permanent place in the picture — but they will stand as mere figures in a landscape, as it were, with mountains and rivers of national traditions far bigger than themselves. English history will be seen to be the story of a race, and not a national portrait gallery. It would not be too extreme a statement to say that statesmen are only the trivial side of history. It would be almost possible to write an intelligible account of the development of England without mentioning personal names except at very occasional moments. For example, before the Conquest it might be necessary to mention Alfred the Great, and perhaps Cnut, with Bede and Dunstan; but the main early story, at least, might be told in that impersonal way which will seem natural when we remember that we are dealing with a nation which scarcely as yet made laws in parliaments and had not yet invented politics and politicians. The people of those days obeyed the rules of their own traditions, as they were maintained in their own local courts : they had scarcely yet heard of kings' courts and their justices. The Norman Conquest itself could almost be told without mentioning the name of William; for he was only one of a group of freebooter feudal lords who were searching for lands and plunder. But though we could easily tell the whole truth about the Conquest without mentioning the leader, yet, strangely enough, it would be necessary to introduce this William as a distinctive individual when we had to tell how he conquered, not our Anglo-Saxon selves, but his own unruly barons. His conquest of England was mainly a part in the collective role of a military group more highly skilled in arms than the opposing native tribe. It is unnecessary to remember the names of the British generals who have crushed the hundred and one native races in our pursuit of the British Empire; and William was merely a general of a superior tribe, so far as the actual invasion went. But his crushing of the baronial independence was far more an act depending on his personal will and individual energy: it was the policy of a specific man.

So one might continue pointing out isolated individual leaks which must stand out as islands in the sea of national history. As a romance, as a way of attracting the attention of the young learner, there are thousands of names worth remembering in the history of England. As a scientific statement of sociological development, it might all be told with very few personalities. Such as Henry II and Edward I might justly assert their right to a distinctive place : and Becket and Simon de Montford would have to be there : as Lanfranc and Anselm might have to be mentioned beside the early Norman kings. But why should we trouble to think of the names of the dozens of self-seeking, quarrelsome lords who called themselves kings and statesmen during the later Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses? Warwick the Kingmaker was, like Henry IV, little more than a man seeking for place and lands; and it is not scientific to call the plans of an adventurer by the dignified name of statesmanship. On the other hand, Edward IV and Richard III, although still adventurers, begin a new line of more individualist kings; and all the Tudors except Edward VI need naming and explaining. By the days of the Tudors it was becoming the more usual habit to rule England by instructions from Westminster and Whitehall; and the personality of the men who gave these orders was therefore of more importance than when a monarch was mainly a military leader.

From this time personal names are thicker on the pages of our history-books, for government had now become a profession, and was daily becoming a more and more successful one — from the point of view of the governors. They were getting more and more successful in making the people obey the laws that the politicians made. The English were gradually getting more laws, and, on the whole, less freedom. But even now there is no reason why the personalities of these later days should cumber our history to the extent they do. Indeed, they rather hamper the tale. The vitally important story of the Reformation — when a gang of adventurers seized the Church lands in the same way that William and his Norman knights had seized their plunder — this fundamental change in English policy, from mediaeval to modern, does not peculiarly attach itself to any individual. To discuss Henry's fancy for Anne Boleyn is only to put the student on the wrong tack. Or to name the theologians is to assume that a religious principle was at stake, when it scarcely was. Whereas we should be concentrating the whole attention on the crowd of insignificant Court officials who were feathering the nests of themselves and their friends out of the Church estates. They were an impersonal class — powerful only when taken in bulk. Thomas Cromwell was only one of these adventurers, and, except as a convenient symbol, there is no real need to mention even him. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, a few years later, stands in a unique position, as we shall see : he was a man who really did govern. But if the list of personal names grows fuller as history continues* yet it must be carefully noted that, although a statesman may make many new laws and may get them obeyed by the people, still it is possible that these laws may remain only on the surface of the national life. Think of all the violent legal changes during the great civil war of the Stuart period — changes expressed by Act of Parliament and enforced by governors' commands. Then realize how insignificant all these were in affecting the national life, compared with the entirely unofficial invention of a few factory machines during the second half of the eighteenth century. Of course, had it had not been for Oliver Cromwell and his dismal men, the trading and manufacturing classes would not have been so well prepared for the Industrial Revolution; if they had not first successfully gone through the political revolution of the Stuart days, they would not have been ready to effect the far greater changes of the eighteenth century. Can any one claim that the Great Charter of John has had as much effect on England as the development of ou coal and iron? The quarrel between the

Lancastrians and Yorkists was merely a back-street brawl compared with the struggle between merchants for the conquest of our economic life. The whole Statute Book has not affected our social system as much as the invention of steam power and the telegraph. Political affairs are only the secondary effect of industrial and private business. The point to grasp at the moment is the fact that it is not mainly by the acts and administrations of statesmen that a nation is most drastically affected. A race is usually only radically impressed by causes of which the governors are not aware until everything is settled. The statesman is usually in the position of a policeman who arrives when the fight is over. Most of the important things that happen in a State are begun and finished by people who pay as little attention to rulers as rulers pay to them. We must, if we are to get the main proportions right, get it firmly in the mind that the sphere of statesmanship may be on the top, and therefore in a very prominent position; yet it does not by any means follow that its influence at all corresponds to its display — for much the same reason that a regimental band is not the most important part of the regiment.

It scarcely seems fair to the rest of this book to explain at such length that its subject is unimportant. Yet the argument has only attempted to put statesmen in their proper place — not to dismiss them. Quite apart from their personal merits, they are such useful symbols of national movements. To borrow from Voltaire, if they had not existed it would have been necessary to invent them. The ones chosen for this volume have been selected because they stand for great tendencies far greater than themselves. Cromwell is chosen because he seems the first representative of modern statesmanship. William Cecil (in many ways the most serious and most accomplished statesman that England ever possessed) might be put first for many reasons; but, as will be discussed later, it is better to regard him as the last of the old school, instead of the first of the new. Cromwell marks the final blowing out of the Middle Ages, which gave their last flicker with Charles Stuart. When the head of that strange figure fell in Whitehall it marked very dramatically the end of the old era. History has no hard boundary lines; but man's mind, being limited and easily confused, must fix dates which will keep him from chaotic wandering. The day of Charles I's execution is one of those most useful dates. The mediaeval system had been a long time dying; but until Charles was beheaded there was something of it left. And his chief executioner is the most fitting figure to express the new system that was to take its place. The mediaeval Monarchy, based to a large extent on the nation, gave way to the modern Oligarchy, based on a privileged class. There was a sense in which Charles had stood for the whole people; and, especially during the eleven years of his absolute rule without a parliament, he had somewhat definitely been the protector of the poor against the rich. If Cromwell and the Commonwealth can be generalized at all, it can only be said that this party stood for the supremacy of the rich. The Commonwealth was the triumphant government of the merchants and the smaller county gentry, who had risen on the raided wealth of the mediaeval Church. The complete triumph of the merchant was not to come until the days when Robert Peel, the son of a merchant prince, rose to be the Chief io MODERN ENGLISH STATESMEN

Minister of England. But that was not to be until the Reform Act of 1832 had put the middle trading class in supreme possession of the franchise. From Cromwell to Peel the merchant and manufacturer and small landlord (that is, the middle class) had been continually growing in power; but it was not yet, as a general rule, considered seemly for any one except a member of the aristocracy to hold office. There was still a vague belief that blue blood had some inherent right to rule. There was still a distrust of the political adventurer, carried to such a degree that we find the nation trusting the political fool — but, after all, the fool does less harm by his folly than the knave by his wits. So although Cromwell by the swords of his Ironside troopers began the process which put the middle classes into power as the basis of modern England, yet for generations to come an aristocratic oligarchy governed on behalf of the new commercialists ; and took a very liberal share of the spoils of wealth, and almost all the offices of State, in return for their services. The three succeeding figures of this book are from the period of the aristocratic oligarchy, which was to give way to the plutocratic oligarchy in the lifetime of Sir Robert Peel. Robert Walpole is chosen partly because he is the finest example of themselves that the Oligarchs have to offer. In Walpole they rose to their first worthy success; and it was a success which they never repeated with as much intellect or as much moral sanity. Walpole was the first and best balanced statesman that the oligarchy produced. Of course, many facts must be admitted against him. He did not rise very far above the somewhat selfish ideals of his period and his class. He was in power as the First Minister of a nation whose

STATESMEN AND STATESMANSHIP n

ruling class was primarily interested in the making of trading profits and the raising of rents. Cromwell had finally decided that the merchant adventurers of the Tudor foundation were to be given a free head in English social development; the middle class was established in power, and remained there even though Charles II came back. By Walpole's day these merchants had enormously increased in influence: the City of London had even more to do with the Revolution of 1688 than with the Great Rebellion against Charles I : and William of Orange gave more attention to the invitation he got from the City magistrates than he gave to the welcome of the peers. Walpole was, above all else, the expression of a merchants' England. But there was a broad dignity about his government which remembered that there was a national price which it was unwise to pay for the benefits of mercantile success. He accepted the fact that fate had made England a great trading community; but he showed no intention of pressing that development beyond its due growth. He was prepared to help English merchants to get their fair share of the wealth of the world: he was prepared to help them to trade as honest men. He was not ready to turn the strength of the British people into an organized scheme for playing the part of pirates to the universe. He protested against fighting Spain just because a set of City merchants saw their way to plundering Spanish commerce; he only gave way to the popular wishes with the cynicism of a gentleman who finds he has become hopelessly involved in a disreputable trading company.

The day may even yet come when his famous prophecy, "They will be wringing their hands soon," will come true: when the British Empire may repentantly admit that it has been too unbounded in its greed, and that the wealth of the world is not worth its envy and contempt. Robert Walpole was the last great English statesman who had that restful sense of social development which has been lost in the tumult of modern government. He carried into the modern period that conception of society which was almost the main characteristic of the mediaeval system: namely, that the growth of a people, like the growth of a child, is bounded by natural laws, and cannot be forced by Acts of Parliament or regulations of departments of State. Walpole would have allowed the trade of England to grow in this natural manner: he did not believe in sudden outbursts of energy, just as an intelligent man does not believe that an infant can be forced to full stature in a year. He would have had England grow, most certainly — but with dignity and peace. The chaos of war he regarded with the contempt of a wise man, and the practice of mercantile piracy with the aversion of a gentleman. He was one of the few modern statesmen who have shown more respect to the traditions of their race than to the intrigues of those unrestful beings who imagine that their passing thoughts and ambitions are the wisdom of eternity. Walpole had no desire for great changes : he only wanted to take the next step, and to take it with skill and dignity.

Indeed, he was a curious survival of an older school of thought, one who would have been better suited to the age of the late Plantagenets. The Pitts have been chosen as the expression of everything that Walpole was not. As a family, they are a typical example of the modern English ruling class. They rose into wealth as the heirs of that somewhat unscrupulous Indian trader, Diamond Pitt; and they won their right to office by a clever linking (by marriage) with the older aristocracy of England. They therefore represented both the mercantile basis of the government of that period, and also the bluer blood of the families that acted as the agents of this middle-class plutocracy. The mental, moral and physical character of the elder William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, cuts across every line of his rival Walpole. Pitt was excitable and a bundle of hysterical emotions; he was unscrupulous and ungenerous in his grasping at power; ? 2 was rotten-timbered in physical structure, and his brain was more than once beyond normal control. Walpole had been content to develop his country with sober care. Pitt dreamed of the building of the British Empire with the terrific force of a nightmare. To make the Empire larger and wealthier became a monomania in his mind. The world in his imagination became a colossal prize-ring, in which he was to drive every opponent over the ropes — with as much blood spilt as possible. His method was physical force; which is not surprising, for he did not possess the brains necessary for diplomacy or systematic thought.

He believed in war, which is naturally the first resource of the dull-witted, as it is the last hope of the wise. The Pitts stood for conquest by war, while Walpole had insisted that what could not be won by peaceful methods was rarely worth the getting. Walpole was exceedingly balanced in his intellect; Chatham was entirely at the mercy of his unstable emotions. Walpole wanted to leave the nation to follow the course of its natural social growth in an orderly and unforced way. Chatham had the temperament of a gambler on the Stock Exchange or an American hustler; he regarded the British Empire as a thing to be "developed"; as a speculator regards the fields and mines of a new colony. With all his pompous manners and imperial pose, Chatham was at heart a company promoter, who thought he saw a good thing in the English race as an investment. He was by no means sordid or selfish in his objects; he was that which was a good deal worse in a statesman — full of heroic and poetical ideals, which made the rather sentimental Englishmen think that they were led by a genius. Whereas they were being misled (as we shall find when we examine the evidence) by something not far from a mental degenerate, in the medical sense. The younger Pitt was the true son of his father Chatham, and completes the family picture. He was not so pushing a salesman as his self-made father; and he had to depend more on his better education and on his inherited position. If he had not been the son of the Earl of Chatham it is safe to say that history would have known little or nothing of his existence. The economists have proved that he was an incompetent financier; and the military experts have proved that he was more than an incompetent bungler at the game of war. It was only as his father's son that he crept into the history-books, and has continued to defy criticism because the historians have usually preferred to copy each other's opinions instead of valuing the facts for themselves. The Pitt Myth is one of those interesting superstitions that have gripped the human mind. It is one of the clearest examples of the social law that men are not so much controlled by their intellect as by their emotions. It also illustrates the troublesome fact that an accidental error of thought can become by inheritance and age more permanent than the truth. The Pitts are the type of the modern statesmen who imagine that a race can be changed by Act of Parliament, manipulated by smart administrators, and driven to its destiny by brilliant soldiering. They represent the change from progress by orderly national tradition to the acrobatic feats of individual energy. They are a clear example of the process by which government has passed from being the expression of the desire of the racial majority (which is near democracy) to the imposing of the will of the governors (which is certainly autocracy, and usually tyranny) .

Edmund Burke was not really a statesman in the sense of being a politician or administrator. He did comparatively little in Parliament or in office — he never rose to Cabinet rank. He was a political pamphleteer and a literary orator, who supplied a certain intellectual padding to the real politicians, who were not too well supplied with brains; and, when they possessed them, were too full of intrigues for office to spend time over mere matters of principle or problems of scientific government. Let it not be supposed that Burke represented intellect. He was a bundle of emotions, like the Earl of Chatham; but they were emotions tinged with historical facts and logical argument; whereas when Chatham ceased to be hysterical he only too frequently became stupid. But Burke had the makings of a better man; he is an interesting example of a young man who was ruined by going into politics, when he might have spent a harmless life as a country parson or a minor poet. He was a sentimentalist of the first rank; and his chief work in politics was to deck out a vast amount of shallow folly and disreputable intrigue in the admirable colours of a florid literary style and a question-begging logic. Burke was one of the men who become the unconscious tools of professional politicians. The Whig "principles" that had so cleverly tricked England in 1688 were getting rather soiled by the days of George III. It was Burke who re-dressed them and gave them another career in the great work of making the English nation believe that its modern politicians are serious statesmen.

Burke is an example of the vast harm that can be done by lending moral and intellectual support to a class that is generally incapable of using such help. He was not a great man either in intellect or in morals; but he was great enough to give his friends too much credit for possessing both. He is perhaps chiefly interesting as an example of the half-intelligent, half-honest persons who are always intruding with conviction and enthusiasm into political life. The main result of their endeavours is that the politicians are able to operate behind a smoke screen of honester men. Not that Burke failed to affect history: it is fair to suggest that his action against the French Revolution modified the history of Europe to this present day. Had it not been for Burke's assistance, it is doubtful whether the politicians would ever have persuaded the English people to struggle until they had crushed the French Revolution. It was Burke's shrill shrieking (like a philosopher in a nightmare) that persuaded not only England, but Europe also, that the Revolution was altogether evil and must be altogether broken. In other words, had it not been for his utter failure to judge the Revolution with the calmness of a philosopher and the impartiality of a historian, Europe would have seen that there was much that was inevitable and necessary in the rising of the French people against their over-centralized bureaucracy. Europe would have seen that the crimes of the Revolution were the deeds of a small gang of scoundrels and fanatics who come to the top in every revolution; and that the men who made the Terror no more represented France than the last sensational murderer represents his race. Had it not been for Burke's melodramatic rhetoric it would have been obvious that the kings of Europe were not concerned with the salvation of the French (as they pretended), but were only anxious to plunder a nation when it was weakened by a struggle with internal anarchy. It was Burke's unbalanced hysteria that probably turned the scale, that encouraged the royal and political adventurers of Europe to attack France, and therefore gave the French militarists and rogues the chance they were seeking — an excuse for appealing to the French nation to defend its frontiers by invading the lands of its neighbours first. Hence the calamity of the Revolutionary Wars; hence the greater calamity of Napoleon. If any one man was guilty of turning the Revolution from a noble beginning to an ignoble conclusion, it was Edmund Burke, the sentimentalist. He is an example of the fact that the well-meaning man can do more harm than the rogue when he meddles with public affairs.