ARTHUR BALFOUR
History Today Vol 2 - April 1952 - British Prime Ministers : XII
By A.P. RYAN - A Monthly Magazine Published From 72 Coleman Street London E.C. 2 -
THE FIRST EARL OF BALFOUR would much have enjoyed
British politics since 1950. He had prophesied, in the Nineties, that in the political world would make it inevitable
that, at some time in the future, a government would have to take office in a parliament with a small majority,
he confessed to looking forward to that experiment with the greatest interest and curiosity. He would have relished
the last few years at Westminster, because he was a tireless student of political affairs which he followed throughout
his exceptionally long career - never going stale and never allowing enthusiasm to colour his innate and detached
cynicism.
"When I look back at myself," he remarked
in extreme old age, "I am appalled by how little I have changed in eighty years." He was born, he once
reflected with quiet satisfaction, about the middle of the nineteenth century and, he added, "I mean to make
the best of the period in which my lot is cast."
He defined himself as a very lazy man who has always had a job on hand. The job was always there, and generally,
from the eighteen eighties until the nineteen twenties, in positions of high responsibility, but the laziness was
a pose.
Balfour stayed in bed in the morning because he wanted time to himself for the hard thinking that was his habit.
He reduced the Tariff Reform controversy to a half-sheet of notepaper because he believed - and rightly that that
was what, intellectually, it boiled down to. It is a mistake to regard him as a dilettante - a gifted and privileged
amateur in politics as in philosophy.
He was, under his bland air of nonchalant self-confidence,
a very tough politician indeed. To understand him it is necessary to appreciate the transitional state of Conservatism
in his day. Conservatives have always been frightened of being accused of reaction and of stupidity. For Balfour
neither of these charges held any terrors. He knew he was not stupid. Looking, in his youth, across the floor of
the House, he was filled with contempt for the speculative outlook of the philosophic Radicals. When their acknowledged
leader, John Stuart Mill, committed himself to the statement that the Conservatives were the stupid party, Balfour
decided that "if Mill really thought this, my own case was clear." His contempt for the accusation of
being a reactionary was no less strong than was his conviction that the leading characters in the Dunciad of his
day were more likely to be found to the left than to the right.
A writer in the New Statesman recently remarked (of Norman Douglas) that his conception of politics was "the
aristocratic one, that human nature does not change." That use of "aristocratic" would have made
Balfour smile. It would have summed up for him much current cant of his day and of ours. He regarded the immutability
of human nature as a truism and nothing that has happened since his death would have altered his opinion.
Where Balfour was fortunate was that he lived in what may be called a comparative lull in the perennial crisis
through which British Conservatives had been passing since the French Revolution. The generation that came before
him, in the first half of the nineteenth century, had often been in apprehension of the barricades. Dangerously
destructive ideas had been imported from the Continent, reflecting themselves in the Reform Bill of 1832 and leading
to a recurrent fear that the mob would rise in violence. As it did not do so, that fear may seem, looking back,
to have been a bogey, but it was real enough in times when the police force was weak.
Balfour was born just too late to be disturbed by the possibility or a catastrophic upheaval in British society.
The year of his birth, 1848, saw the last great revolutionary movement in Europe before 1917. The first dread of
reform had worn off by the time that Balfour began to take notice of affairs. While he was a schoolboy at Eton
and an under-graduate at Trinity, Cambridge, wearing the blue and silver gown of a privileged Fellow-Commoner,
the next phase of Conservative apprehension was at its height. There raged, through the Fifties and Sixties, a
too-little-remembered debate on the hostages that would be given to fortune if the franchise were widened. The
Conservatives did not dare to play King Canute to the rising tide of democracy, but they were frankly and articulately
scared that it would end by drowning the rights of property and the enjoyment of liberty.
Disraeli declared that, if you establish a democracy, you must, in due season, reap fruits of democracy, and he
defined these being extravagant expenditure, discontent meeting it and insecurity of property liberty - the whole
culminating in a reaction despotism. This did not prevent the Conservatives, as practical politicians, from competing
with the other groups in Parliament for popular favour by extending the franchise Lord Robert Cecil, Balfour's
uncle and political mentor, went temporarily into the wilderness in protest against what he regarded as abandonment
by his party of the true doctrines of Toryism.
Salisbury (as Lord Robert Cecil became) was the
most reasoned spokesman of the case against democracy. He maintained that the great object of all constitutional
restrictions is to prevent any majority from tyrannizing over minorities - any class dominating over another. No
matter what the class, such - in his view - is the selfishness of mankind that tyranny is almost sure to result.
Universal suffrage would mean that the rich paid all the taxes and the poor made all the laws. Balfour absorbed
this doctrine, but it troubled him less than it did his uncle, owing to the unexpectedly mild immediate consequences
of the several mid-Victorian Reform Acts. He had no illusions about their ultimate consequences, but, in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century and the first six years of the twentieth, things did not look so bad from the
point of view of the philosophic Conservative. Nevertheless, danger was always round the corner. Propagandists,
it was argued, had effected an association between the word democracy and the ideas of freedom and progress which
was wholly unwarranted by history and by experience. It was a triumph of persuasion. A new era could never be said
to have secured its footing or to be furnished with a proper apparatus for conquering the popular mind until its
most important fallacies had been disguised in the form of catchwords or party cries. The man who first connected
the words freedom and progress with the word democracy did this inestimable service to the democratic cause.
Views so hard to explain to the mass of the people were obviously not practical politics, and so they did not find
expression in the programmes of the Conservative Party. Its leaders conceived their most prudent course to be to
fight a delaying action. They were no less ready than were their opponents to take measures to improve the economic
lot of the working classes, and to spread education, but they did not think - as most enthusiastic Liberals and
all Radicals thought - that the masses, if given the chance - that is, the vote - would play fairly in the national
interest. Balfour entered Parliament in 1874, when the future consequences of democracy were being rewarded, on
one side, with cloaked dismay and on the other, with undisguised hopes of making a good thing out of them.
As he learnt parliamentary experience, his doughty opponent Chamberlain was setting the Radical pace much faster
than Gladstone and the Whigs liked. At last, the exultant left-wingers cried, the majority of the nation is to
be represented by a majority in the House of Commons, and ideas and wants which have, hitherto, been ignored will
find a voice in Parliament and will compel the attention of statesmen. New conceptions of public duty, new developments
in social enterprise, new estimates of the natural obligations of the members of the community to one another,
were declared to have come into view and to be demanding consideration. The death knell of the laissez-faire system
had been sounded. There was, said the Radicals bluntly, to be intervention by the state on behalf of the weak against
the strong, in the interests of labour against capital and of want and suffering against luxury. This, for many
Conservatives, seemed fustian, demagogic stuff, but its probable effects on the polls could not be ignored.
Lord Randolph Churchill, who was born only seven months after Balfour, had the intuitive feeling that, unless Conservatives
came out of their bath in the warm waters of the past, they would find that the Radicals had run away with their
clothes. So, he raised the cry of " Tory democracy." He demanded, in a letter to The Times that shocked
some of his colleagues and earned Balfour's mild disapproval, an abrupt change in party leadership. A statesman,
he thundered, must be found "who fears not to meet, and who knows how to sway, immense masses of the working
classes." Balfour felt that this sort of talk was unnecessary because, as he believed, the Britain of the
Eighties could already be described as a democracy, and he much disliked rhetoric and highly-coloured platform
manoeuvring.
There might well have been a resounding dash that
would have precipitated the events of 1906 in an earlier generation. How far Bailout, as a young man, would have
played his part in such a storm, effectively and with decision, is a fascinating speculation. Two circumstances,
both turning on individual personality, saved him from being put to this trial. Gladstone, by being converted,
in an almost messianic manner, to Home Rule, split the Liberals, lost Chamberlain from the reforming camp and postponed,
for twenty years, the struggle that had seemed imminent. That was a mighty reprieve for a man of Bailout's temperament
and he was, further, left in peace by the impulsive resignation of Randolph Churchill which left the Cecilian policies
dominant in the Conservative Party.
Those who recall Balfour as a venerable and decorative figure, somewhat easily confused with Scandinavian royalty
in photographs of the Riviera tennis courts, may overlook the significance to his career of what he had been through
in this formative period. He seemed, in the Twenties, so serenely above the battle and his shilly-shallying (as
it was called by his many critics in his own party) over Tariff Reform was still so vivid a memory that it was
hard to picture him as having ever been anything but an unruffled and a rather ineffective elder statesman. In
fact, the hard political school in which he had been brought up had taught him that the only way of pulling off
the inevitable was to walk as delicately as Agag along the stony and downward path of democracy. Every now and
then he spoke aloud on this issue. We are probably nearer than we have ever been before, he let fall on one occasion,
to entrusting our affairs to those who are prepared to be politicians and nothing but politicians and who work
the political machine only as professional politicians. When he added as he did that he was not using "professional"
in a bad or a degrading sense, he may be suspected of a polite lack of candour. He thought that, as time went on,
the demand made on legislators and on administrators for work that is neither administration nor legislation -
that is, for playing up to the masses - must become so heavy that both legislation and administration were likely
to suffer.
You will find it more and more difficult, he warned those who cared to hear him, to get, at the same time, men
of adequate leisure and adequate position who are prepared to undergo the great toil which inevitably now attaches
to political life. Democracy, he lamented, seems incapable in many cases of creating an assembly representing itself
to which it can pay even the smallest possible tribute of respect. He did not want a better Second Chamber he wanted
a stronger one. He saw a danger in having, in either House, too many crotcheteers, too many doctrinaires, too many
men who preach their own particular fancy and refuse to work with their fellow countrymen. Above all, he wanted
a brake in Parliament which would be powerful enough to resist "the temporary gust of the moment." Innovation,
which he recognized as necessary, ought, he maintained, to be deeply based on the history of our country, and impregnated
with recollection of what had been before. It was only if we followed out that tradition that we would be able
to make those reforms which last and form a stage in the development of the nation.
Holding by this philosophy, he decided that Socialism
meant mischief He was very much amused, he once said, by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald having taunted the opponents of Labour
for their fears of communism. "How the Tories and the Liberals ought to thank God for Russian Bolsheviks,"
Mr. MacDonald had exulted, and, he had gone on, "There is no bogy like it, and how can they live without bogies?
A bogy is essential to the interests of reaction in the country." Balfour's comment on this was, "1 quite
agree that, if by a bogy you mean an object lesson, Bolshevist Russia is an object lesson." His attack on
socialism was based on the ideas that he had formed under the guidance of Salisbury. Socialists would not deny,
he pointed out, that they proposed complete revolution in economic and juridical policy. On the contrary, they
would boast of it and say "this is a conflict between the 'haves and the 'have nots'." That, as Balfour
saw it, is a profoundly misleading account of the real issue.
It is very easy to make the rich poor. All the efforts of mankind, all the inventions of men of science, and of
natural philosophy, all the progress of education have done much and may do much more to better the lot of the
great mass of humanity; but this has nothing to do with a conflict between rich and poor. The real point is this
- under what industrial system do we get the best results for the well-being of the great mass of the people? The
system which then prevailed did produce a certain number of rich men. The question still remained - would any system
the Socialists proposed to substitute diminish the number of poor? It is perfectly easy to equalize down; the problem
of the statesman is to do what he can to equalize up. It is a simple task for some absolute ruler to reduce all
his subjects to a lot little better than that of a beast, but it requires much more than power, it requires knowledge,
wisdom, scientific perception of facts to raise any population above the level.
That, as Balfour saw the changing world, was the path that lay ahead and he denied that it could be followed merely
by confiscating capital and appropriating wealth for the State. To do that was, on the contrary, the profoundest
of all mistakes. It assumed that there is international wealth as a fixed quantity which you can cut up and divide
at the will of the legislature. National wealth is due to a daily process. Day by day it is being made, day by
day it is being used, and the task is to preserve what has been inherited of the machinery for producing this wealth
and to better it if we can. We cannot sell unless we are efficient (he said in 1924), and unless we sell we starve
- and observe that our position is one far less secure than it was in the time of our fathers. Many nations are
wholly self--supporting in the essentials of life, but we are not in that happy category. It is absolutely necessary
for this island to sell abroad.
So Balfour spoke and thought and, unless the depth of conviction thus, from time to time, revealed is understood, his public actions cannot be explained.
Throughout his half-century-long career in Parliament, he was faced by opponents who had sincerely persuaded themselves that the common man would make a better and a less selfish job of politics than had the aristocrats and the middle class. For Balfour, the virtuous common man was a myth like the noble savage of the eighteenth-century idealists. One man, in his view, was on the average the same as another and the more cooks there were stirring the political broth, the greater the chances of its being spoilt.
This scepticism about progress along the predestined channels of late Victorian and Edwardian development was reinforced by a general philosophic caution. What he doubted was as much the dogmatism of science as that of religion.
 |
His voluminous writings on these subjects were summed
up when he pointed out that "the sceptic says that, as we can prove nothing, we may believe anything. I say
that, as we believe a great deal and intend to go on believing it, we should be well advised to discover on what
assumption we may believe it most reasonably." Against the background of this cast of mind, Balfour's active career may be followed step by step. It was an almost fabulously long innings. He went with Salisbury in the first train that entered Paris after the Commune was defeated in 1871, only a few weeks after the King of Prussia had been declared Emperor of Germany in the Palace of Versailles. He signed, on behalf of his country, as Foreign Minister, in that great gallery where the Emperor William first became Emperor, the Treaty of Versailles that ended the Empire whose beginnings he had witnessed. He first joined the Cabinet in 1886, as Secretary for Scotland, and almost immediately afterwards, in a very few months, he became Irish Secretary. When, at the death of Mr. W. H. Smith, he became Leader of the House of Commons, he began a course of leadership of the party in the House which lasted for twenty years. That period included ten years of leadership of the whole House - a longer continuous leadership than that of any minister since Pitt. |
The tenacity and staying power thus revealed derived
from Balfour's ability to concentrate on the job in hand. He was a master of improvisation, a classical opportunist.
His basic philosophy, as has been shown, never changed, but he turned that acute analytical eye like a microscope
on to each successive problem as it came into focus. Ireland first showed the political world that there was an
iron framework to those elegant and seemingly pliant proportions. "Pretty Fanny," the Irish first called
him, and quickly changed the nickname to "Bloody Balfour." It was a high compliment from patriots who
saw that they were faced with a man determined to treat them roughly and allergic to the blarney that had worked
such wonders in the Liberal camp. Home Rule did not deserve, according to Balfour, to be described as a policy
at all. It provided no solution of any Irish - or British - difference. It was a parliamentary device and not a
constitutional remedy. His attitude towards Ireland is an early and good example both of his clear thinking and
of the limitations of his thought. He saw through the illusion that Southern Ireland would be satisfied in the
long run with anything short of independence. He realized that Britain was being challenged by a nationalist movement,
but he thought this could be scotched by resolute common sense. "I look forward to a time," he asserted
optimistically, "when Irish patriotism will as easily combine with British patriotism as Scottish patriotism
combines now." It is still too early to judge whether that assessment of the situation for Ireland - or for
Scotland - will ultimately turn out to be sound.
The magnitude of Balfour's work may be measured by noting that his tenure of office as Prime Minister was no more
than a brief and inglorious episode. He succeeded, in Mr. Churchill's phrase, to an exhausted inheritance, and
he cut a poor figure in his efforts to preserve party unity without surrendering to Chamberlain. His heart was
not in the Tariff Reform controversy and, as Prime Minister, he did no more in home affairs than to mark time and
postpone - and perhaps increase - the inevitable Liberal victory. While this was preparing, his energies were much
engaged in readjusting the balance of Europe and in cementing the Japanese and French alliances. When he came back
into office in the first war he was an old man and content to use his great knowledge of affairs and towering prestige
to put a brake, as often as he could, on Lloyd George. The gift for detached, constructive thought that never deserted
him made him a source of wisdom in the cabinet, but he was not by temperament a leader.
In private life Balfour enjoyed himself as a social and cultured bachelor. His charm at house and dinner parties
cast its spell so widely that H. G. Wells came under it as much as did the aristocratic highbrows of the Souls.
Although he was a Victorian, he looked farther back for the way of life that attracted him. The middle third of
the nineteenth century, he confessed, did not appeal to him. It reminded him too much, he said, of Landseer's pictures
and of the revival of Gothic. He felt no sentiment of allegiance towards any of the intellectual dynasties which
then held sway; neither the "thin lucidity of Mill nor the windy prophesying's of Carlyle," neither Comte
nor yet Newman were able to arouse in him the enthusiasm of a disciple. He turned with pleasure from the Corn Law
squabbles to the Napoleonic wars, from Thackeray and Dickens to Scott and Miss Austen, from Tennyson and Browning
to Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley. The eighteenth century soothed him. When the jazz had stopped in his
favourite Paris restaurant at the time of the peace conference, he would ask the chef d'orchestre to play him some
eighteenth-century French music, after which he would walk home contentedly to bed. A man with such inner resources
could afford, serenely and unruffled, to play his part in waking the best of what he regarded as a bad job. And
after all, would it turn out in the end to be a bad job? Even democracy might work. One never knew. And anyway,
sooner or later, there would be another Ice Age.
