THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

3

I made my breach with the party on the Budget.

In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine

piece of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected

display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this

movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the

Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the

floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven

the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once

manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals

in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.

The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public

service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.

I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most

strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and

attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure

of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in

an utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals

was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate

values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to

give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class

upon which we had hitherto relied-not unjustifiably-for certain

broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective

judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish

landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to

a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and

wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state. You have

taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged

Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now propose to do

the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which has many

fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is

nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense

of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you

are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at

it not only in the House, but in the press…

The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my

defection.

Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the

KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was

treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in

provocative terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings

at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a

correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which

ended in my seeing a deputation.

My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty

people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were

manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There

was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black-I think to mark

his sense of the occasion-and curiously suggestive in his respect

for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the

KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of

Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never

abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten

years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was

part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick

Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of

dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway

between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.

There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey

style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and

a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been

taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation,

which included two other public-spirited ladies and several

ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus

going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill

forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say

"Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't

upon them at the time.

I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but

quite definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision.

Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand

for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed

at the present time. The whole process of politics which bulks so

solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth

of petty motives above abysms of indifference…

Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.

"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll

resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if

there is I shan't stand again. You don't want the bother and

expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.

But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be

necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the

better for the party. The Lords are in a corner; they've got to

fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.

Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last for

years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You

Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely

indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in

the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British

constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it

is sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords-and I don't

see why he shouldn't-you have no Republican movement whatever to

fall back upon. You lost it during the Era of GoodTaste. The

country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give

it. I don't see what you will do… For my own part, I mean to

spend a year or so between a window and my writingdesk."

I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all

this with very great regret…"