Men of the Hearth and Home

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 660, 11 May 1929, Page 29

Men of the Hearth and Home

Pen Picture of Famous Statesmen STANLEY BALDWIN, the Conservative, his challengers, Bamsav MacDonald the Socialist, and Lloyd George the Liberal —these are men, not of the Turf, not of the club, not of the pleasure resort, but of the home and that hearth-rug which, in Britain, conceals the Union Jack on its under side. So writes P. W. Wilson, in a vivid pen-picture to the “New York Times Magazine”—a fine study of Great Britain’s three musketeers in politics.

A LL of these statesmen are begin■4A- ning to be conscious of the flight of time. At the next test, Baldwin will be 61 years old, MacDonald 63 and Lloyd George 66; and while Palmerston and Gladstone occupied Downing Street in their eighties, it cannot be said that time, reckoned by quinquennial Parliaments, is on the side of statesmen in their sixties. In the later laps of every race the athlete must sprint to win. At any rate, Lloyd George, with a big fund at. his back, says that he is “coming along, coming along.” The forces behind these men are divergent. Baldwin has most of the bishops, all of the brewers and the conservatism of the nation, masculine and feminine. MacDonald has the mass of the urban workers, the more radical dissenters and the intellectuals who are emancipated at once from the older parties and the older experience. Lloyd George has the good old: steady-going Gladstonians, who know all about free trade and political economy and believe in that ability which has always been attributed to the Whigs. True to a Type But between the men themselves,, estimated by caste, not character, there are no evident distinctions. They are true to a type. . . . Good, not gay, they are the product of the Nonconformist conscience. From their moorings they may have drifted into ampler and less charted oceans of belief, but the harbour from which they set forth was, in Stanley Baldwin's case, English Methodism, in MacDonald’s Scottish Presbyterianism, and in Lloyd George’s, Welsh Baptistry. At weddings and funerals and coronations, these men respond to the same emotions. At the strains of Handel’s Largo, which is what England to-day means by orthodoxy, they are equally serious. All of them wear silk hats. You would not easily tell those hats apart. For in all three cases, the size of the hat, as is usual wjth public men, tends to increase—this is the fact —year by year. Of the triumvirate, Baldwin alone is a millionaire. But if he inherited a fortune, MacDonald married one, while Lloyd George has recently done good work with his pen. All three men have thus acquired a stake in the country. All stand equally for a decent attitude toward the rights of property. There is no symptom of revolution.

The Empire’s Sky Pilot Stanley Baldwin is the sky pilot of the British Commonwealth —the Man from the Third Floor Back, the John Halifax, Gentleman, of Downing St. As John Halifax pledged his fortune to save the local bank, so during the war did Baldwin hand over a quarter of his property as a free gift to the nation. With such a man, it is impossible to quarrel and not easy to argue. Lloyd George and MacDonald are frankly in the game of politics for all they are worth, to win or lose. But Baldwin, placidly smoking his briar pipe, gives the impression that he is only bearing the burden and heat of the day because, in the language of cricket, which he understands so well, the captain has put him on to howl, and he must be loyal to the team. It is only in retrospect that we discern the quiet and even stealthy advance of this amateur in politics. In the Coalition, Baldwin served at the Treasury. As Financial Secretary, he had to answer innumerable questions, and, strange to say, when he met a, heckler, he made a friend. Suddenly, this mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled a ship of State, ran the black flag to the mast head, and in association with Bonar Law, told Lloyd George to walk the plank. Having destroyed the Government. Baldwin wearily became the Chancellor of the Exchequer and relapsed into his usual amiability. How to get rid of Baldwin is the problem. What is to be done with a man, liked by everybody, who only desires, as he says, to have “peace in our time,” and quotes Abraham Lincoln to the United States, adding after a pause, “So be it?” What Baldwin himself says is that he is not so simple as some people suppose—a suggestion which, coming from any one else, would have been a form of impiety. Perhaps he is right. It may be that he has his subtle moments, when he causes foam at the mouth by remarking blandly that Lloyd George seldom reads a book, or quotes with regretful gusto what Lloyd George has been writing about England for consumption in the United States. When Baldwin is asked why Churchill, as a free-trader, sits in the same Cabinet as Joynson-Hicks, a protectionist, he comments blandly on “the many-sided-ness of truth.” Not a Simple Simon Baldwin at any given moment is so sincere in saying what he means that one forgets how sincere he was when, not so long ago, he said something not quite the same. He does not govern the nation. He pervades it. The heathen rage, but he proceeds imperturbably to talk, and with an admirable voice for the radio, on topics like Sir Roger de Coverley, Queen Elizabeth’s merchant adventurers and Harrow School, so extolling the traditions, the courtesies and the sense of fairplay in England. Artist in Advertisement To the mind oi Hoyd George, mere nonchalance tn politics is sheer nonsense. He does not pretend tnat he does not care. He enters the ring in full armour, with a pennon to his lance and a crest on his helmet, and sends forth his challenge. With the Press mobilised by millions of circulation, and with the cinema popularising pictures, Lloyd George knows that the proletariat is more interested in persons whom they see than in parties which they must join and in programmes which have to he read. As the greatest living expert in publicity, therefore, we may watch him, adding paragraphs and photographs to principles and excelling even his own high record as an artist in advertisement. A year or two ago it seemed as if Lloyd George’s oratory had lost some of its sparkle. Even the House of Commons did not listen. But the sun is again shining in the mountains of Wales, the streams are again radiant with rainbows.

Indeed, the situation precisely suits his taste for strategy. He is a bilinguist. fighting on two fronts. Moreover, he has this advantage over both

his opponents. Neither Baldwin nor MacDonald can afford to assume office except as Prime Minister. But Lloyd George, like Balfour, will lose nothing of his prestige if he joins a Cabinet as elder statesman. He is the man whom neither side wishes to leave outside as a free critic. He cannot win, but he cannot lose. A Highland Chieftain In knowledge broader, in convictions deeper, in travel more experienced, and last, but not least, in antipathies more resolute, Ramsay MacDonald —a Highland chieftain in manner, in voice and, above all, in smouldering eye and in an ample wealth of white hair—sits lonely, even among his colleagues, brooding over tbe scars of the past and tbe chances of the future. Remote in his sorrow as widower, he continues to quarrel with Liberalism, which quarrel is to-day an obsession—a feud elevated into a faith. It is with a superb tenacity that he holds his party, dominating followers who fail to understand him. So this scholar of men and movements, who hobnobbed with Morley and Scheidemann and Smuts, and can visit the United States almost unseen, has managed to crush his Communists and reduce even Glasgow to a surly acquiescence in Socialism. He has reason to be cautious. Gravely depleted in membership as a result of the general strike, trade unions are inclined to co-operate with Lord Melchett and the employers. Hence, the Labour Party approximates to the Liberalism of the Left, and MacDonald is convinced that it will absorb Liberalism. It is an expectation which the election will decide, one way or the other. Not that the fray will release any one of the three leaders from the clutches of the other two. In the next House of Commons it is certain as anything can be that all of them will have seats. Performing on different instruments, they will continue the same trio, and with a good deal of suppressed affection, they will indulge in spectacular hatred. As an acquired taste, they will continue cordially to detest one another until the time-long distant, let us hope—when in due course each will concede to the other an honoured grave in an overcrowded Westminster Abbey, where even Pitt and Fox are able to maintain a coalition.