THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.

The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very

ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and

quite out of touch with the mass of the party. For a time

Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old

quarrels. The early Educational legislation was sectarian and

unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the

attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was altogether

for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the

Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting. I was

recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the

Government so early as the second reading of the first Education

Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my

intention in the heat of speaking,-it is a way with inexperienced

man. I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies

of sects and little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods

with the manifest needs of the time.

Iam not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I

worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.

I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were

already a little curious about me because of my writings. Several

of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr.

Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that

engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an

approving "Hear, Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two

futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to

begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the

effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what

I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was

getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of

having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt

for that encouraging cheer.

Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in

the world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being

easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and

hesitations of members behind the chair-not mere audience units,

but men who matter-the desolating emptiness that spreads itself

round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined

crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering

movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary

Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic

background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a

confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a

pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A

misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily

disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak

with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House

imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into

the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of

some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of

an auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such

as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose

one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose

one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with

qualifications.