UNKIND FORTUNE

Evening Star, Issue 22444, 15 September 1936, Page 11

UNKIND FORTUNE

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN DEFEAT OF HIS AMBITION Of the statesmen of the nineteenth century who influenced politics profoundly without ever holding the first place in government, two are in a class oy themselves—Cobden and Chamberlain (writes J. L. Hammond, in the ‘ Manchester Guardian ’). Hut there is an important difference between them. Cobden never desired office; Chamberlain was bitterly disappointed that he was never Prime Minister. Fortune seems to be unkind to a man who comes so near to the chief prize, first as a Liberal and then a Unionist, and missed it twice. Chamberlain, who was under no illusions about his force and ability, might well think it was fortune and fortune alone that had robbed him of his duo. It is difficult for his contemporaries to be just to a politician who ends his career with ideas very different from those with which he starts, especially if he is equally bitter and unscrupulous in debate whatever the views he is defending or attacking at the moment. Chamberlain never gave or asked quarter. He was hard and ruthless in controversy, and the blows he gave and the blows he received when he separated from the Radicals in 1886 were as savage as any that have ever been exchanged in civil way. It is not surprising that his character and reputation were obscured to those who disagreed with him by the violence that he put into his quarrels. EASIER TO JUDGE. To-day it is much easier to judge him and to understand his career. For if be was unlucky, as he thought, ia life he has been- singularly lucky m death. Mr Garvin’s masterly biography has done him the kind of justice that can only be done by a man who is not a partisan but an historian; a writer who can put his hero into a true seting of persons and politics, showing how his mind developed, under what impulses he moved, by what light or twilight he was guided. The Chamberlain who emerges is an ambitious man, a self-confident man, a combative man, a man whose ideas may often seem crude and untempered, a man who missed some essential truths, but a man of brilliant gifts, who obeyed consistently' his own sense of duty and was ready to sacrifice his personal interests when duty demanded. Chamberlain’s misfortune was not that he missed being Prime Minister, for nobody can say whether he would have been a success in that office—bis excursions into tbe world of foreign diplomacy do not create confidence—but that circumstances so fell out as to make his great gifts less useful to his country than they might have been. He was the first statesman of commanding power to put the whole question of town civilisation in its proper place in politics. His career as reformer in Birmingham is a landmark in English history. He threw into that crusade all the passion that Disiaeh had put into ‘ Sybil,’ and Ruskm, Carlyle, and Dickens into sermons that their age admired and disregarded. IN VIOLENT STORMS. When he stepped from the mayor’s office almost straight into Cabinet office there was every reason to hope that Ins knowledge and genius would find scope in national legislation. But his first Government, like his second, found itself caught in storms so violent that it had little time or energy for domestic reform. Schemes for local government were hatched, but they remained schemes, watched and tended by Dilke and others, while the Government passed from disaster to disaster in Egypt, South Africa, and Ireland. Chamberlain was immersed in these problems, and by way of satisfying Ins balked instincts as a social reformer he rail I at Whigs like Hartington and Goschen, and landed the unfortunate Prime Minister in perpetual controversy with the Queen and in incessant trouble as peacemaker in his Cabinet. Chamberlain had besides his gifts as a social reformer tbe gifts of conspicuous courage and independence. These he used in the difficult situation created

by the rise of Parnell and the new and violent Irish Party. To conventional statesmen like Hartington Parnell was an untouchable, and the idea of consulting the Irish Party or considering it was treason. Chamberlain defied these conventions. He was completely indifferent to the displeasure of the Court and of high society. He made a speech about the Land League which excited the Tories to fury. WISDOM UNDOUBTED. How far he and Gladstone were wise in the methods they employed in the negotiations that ended in Parnell’s release from Kilmainham is a question on which different views may be held. But the wisdom of their decision to defy that convention is as unmistakable as its courage. Then followed the shattering disaster of tjie murders in Phcenix Park, and Chamberlain’s work was destroyed. Three years later Chamberlain was . again foiled by fate. He was in negotiation with Parnell over his scheme for local government reform, and though the Liberal Cabinet was divided he had Gladstone behind him. Then the Government fell on the Budget, and for a few months Salisbury was in power. In those months occurred the fatal interview -between Carnarvon and Parnell which convinced Parnell that he could get more from the Conservatives than he was offered by the Liberals, and the Irish question assumed its new and dramatic form. Chamberlain was against Home Rule, though he came very near to accepting it as the less of two evils, and he believed—showing less insight than Gladstone—that even Gladstone could not bring the working classes to accept it. Thus the man who had been foremost in denouncing and resisting coercion and calling for reform found himself driven into opposition to the Irish. They were bitter and unjust to him, and he was soon their bitterest foe. It is unnecessary to speak of all the consequences of this quarrel to his capacity for serving his old Radical causes. They stand out in history. MODERATION WITH KRUGER. In his second career as a Cabinet Minister he came near to a great success, but in this case he was more responsible for his failure. If he had settled the South African question without war he would have saved not only his own country and South Africa, but Europe at large from great calamities. Mr Garvin’s biography and the Milner Papers both prove that he showed great moderation, forbearance, and wisdom in his handling of the quarrel with Krpger and that he was not far from success. He was hampered by two obstacles. One was, of course, the personality and judgment of Milner. The other was the atmosphere created by the Raid and the failure to punish it. For that failure Chamberlain was responsible. He was not in a position to meet the challenge offered to the Imperial Government by the Chartered Company and its conspirators, because within a few weeks of entering the Colonial Office he had fallen into n trap from which even his energy and strength of mind could not find a way of escape. His entanglement in the ideas and plans of Rhodes and his friends tied his hands when he had to act as a Minister, and because he was not free to act he could not take the steps that would have put Great Britain right wtih South Africa and right with foreign opinion. If the Charter had been revoked, and Chamberlain said in one of his letters that if all the facts were known it would be the death blow to the Charter,. and Rhodes had been censured, there would have been a good chance of reaching a settlement in spite of Kruger’s obstinacy. But when Chamberlain tried to give South Africa peace he was hampered at every turn by the memories of the Raid and of his praise of Rhodes. ~ AS A PROTECTIONIST. When Chamberlain took up the cause of Imperial Protection his critics not unnaturally contrasted his new views with his old enthusiasm for Free Trade as a further proof of his degeneracy. But the change was intelligible enough. Down to the ’seventies or ’eighties the typical man of business in England, influenced by the history of the textile industries, was a Free Trader. Then, with the expansion and growing importance of the iron and steel industries and the changes in our circumstances due to the industrial development of the Continent, economic Imperialism undermined the Liberal

tradition of Bright and Cobden. Chamberlain was a representative Englishman of his class because he passed through this transformation. But wheta he started out on his crusade to convert the British people he was under two great disadvantages. The war, though it had intensified the Imperialist sentiment on which he relied, had already begun to produce the reaction that always follows when passions are driven too hard. And one of the consequences of the war had been the introduction of Chinese labour into the Transvaal mines. Chamberlain was trying to speak to the democracy with the millionaires of the Rand on his back. Thus the concession to the Johannesburg capitalists was a fatal obstacle to the plan of tempting the workman with Tariff Reform as the means of preventing unemployment. Thus the war which had seemed at the time to raise his reputation and popularity higher than ever, proved one of the causes of the defeat of the last and not least ardent of his ambitions.