The Passing of Lloyd George
W r e have no knowledge of , what moved Mr. Lloyd George to his public rebuke of the attitude of the Churches to his Irish and social policy (says the Nation and the Athenaeum for June 25). It may have been a twinge of. conscience, or an annoying memory of the time when he himself was a somewhat conspicuous dealer in public lighteousness. The Prime Minister, having in his salad days used the,. Free Churches for all the political influence he could get out of them, may have considered that the great battle of Church and State was over, and that having been induced to promote the war and tolerate the peace, official Christianity would stand anything. He may have been reasonably annoyed to find that it still had a conscience left. Or he may have felt genuine surprise that its lantern should have been turned on him rather than on Sinn Fein and the Miners’ Federation. But there is no mistaking his general line of thought. Let the Church know her place; she was the second, not the first. The real issues—war, the relations of Labor and Capital, the government of rebel peoples—were committed to the politicians. They were the directing classes. The Churchman could create an atmosphere; he had no right to an opinion, even, it would seem, to a moral judgment. Now this is a momentous issue; and we have no desire to shirk it. It may seem a trifle audacious for a singularly light-minded member of the political class to move religion out of the world in the hour when most of its younger thinkers plead for her. return, and when the very existence of humanity may depend on its power to rediscover a common rule of spiritual life. But that, in effect, is the demand of the politics of the great materialistic period. It was the earlier Darwinians who banished the soul from physical evolution. And now the opportunist statesmen, who allowed and prepared for the war without any mental reference to its effect on the future of the race, ask to be allowed to deal as they please with the fragments of society that remain. Mr. George himself, be it remembered, insisted on a. fight to a finish. Ho would listen to no argument _ for a compromise—no suggestion that the warring States must find the means of mutual accommodation they have since been laboring in vain to discover. After-war Europe and England live on; but how P On a baser level of thought than before the war, which was not a time of spiritual force or creative intelligence. Never were our people so divided and so unsettled. Never had they less confidence in their rulers and in each other. The war was to have brought them security; physically and militarily, indeed, England has nothing to fear. Yet her nerve-system remains stretched out on a tremulous thread of anxiety and apprehension. Mr. George has the audacity to tell the Colonial Premiers that the Empire is built, not on “force,” but on “goodwill” and “mutual understanding.” How much more on “force,”- and how much less on “goodwill” and “understanding” since Mr. George came into power, let the state of Ireland, of Labor, of Egypt, of India say. All is worsened; and if the Bishop of Chelmsford pleads that the trouble is due to the divorce of politics from religion, Mr. George is the last man in the world to say him nay. It is a great evil foi a nation to quit the path of justice, encumbered as it may be, and to set up the horrible canon of revenge. Mr. George did this, and no modern Government ever sank lower. The Churches, or some of them, protested, not because they disliked Mr. George, but because their creed forbade them to tolerate murder. Mr. George’s retort is' that God is love, and that the business of the Church is not to take sides in public life, but to “create an atmosphere.” The Prime Minister aggravates his offence by mixing sentimental piety with disregard of the plain obligations of Christian ethics. Love . descends on the earth in no mystic showers of general blessing; it lives or dies in the hearts of its chosen ministers. Mr. George had it in his power to “create” a greater circle of divine love in Central Europe, and a smaller one in Southern Ireland. He preferred the blockade and the fires of Balhriggcin. Louis XIV. and Tilly did nothing worse; but humanity has not yet consented to canonise the dragonnades of the Thirty Years’ War. • , • - But “ myopic demagogy,” in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s phrase, is, we hope, nearing the end of its
disastrous day. While the religious world is thus at odds with Mr. Lloyd George, a movement has arisen in secular politics which is destined, to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after, to bring his career as Prime Minister to an end. There can be no longer any doubt that the continued rout of the Ministerial candidates in the constituencies has at last produced a crisis in the Tory Party, and that their association with the Coalition is at stake. For a false situation has suddenly grown into an intolerable one. Mr. George was never their chief; and now his political mind and theirs, or rather his entire scheme and method of government, are in active opposition. The whole sympathy of the Tory leaders and the average Tory voter is with the anti-waste propaganda which is sweeping over the country like a flood. To-day the Government does not own a safe seat in Great Britain and Ireland. It lacks even the power to save itself from anti-waste by grovelling to it. Nor is anti-waste a passing fad. There are elements, personal and political, in this agitation which we hope never, to see linked, directly or indirectly, with the government of England. But with the mass of the electors it is no more a deliberate act than the flight of sheep to shelter in a storm, The country stands on the brink of industrial and financial ruin; and if ever there was a natural wastrel at the head of affairs, it is Mr. George. The Prime Minister’s mishandling of the nation is, in our view, complete. He destroys, without a touch of creative energy; and his extraordinary talent for politics has revealed his corrfplete incapacity for government. In two years he has led us to a pass in which the industrial force of Britain has almost ceased to operate. This country may have great - possessions and prestige; but trade is its life-blood, and that is flowing away in a drain of taxes such as no prospering community could ever sustain and live. But England is not prosperous. She has lost much trade since the war, and, taking her- most formidable competitors, it is doubtful whether she stands within 40 to 60 per cent, of the German or American rate of production, even in her established and staple industries. Cotton stands secure; can as much be said of any other great industrial occupation? Nor is there any firm prospect of recovery for our stricken foreign trade. Mr. George has utterly antagonised Labor, and he has cruelly penalised it. The workman is threatened with the loss of the standard of living he on during the war; but even if that goes and real wages sink to the level of 1914 or below it, the problem of industry remains unsolved, for it is the morale and the productive power of Labor, not its reward, which is today the critical factor. This, again, the Government cannot stimulate, ■ and has done much to depress and destroy. The trouble, therefore, is moral; trust is gone, and cannot be restored. There is to-day not a segment of industrial England that believes in Mr. George’s management of its affairs. To get rid of so characterless a thing is not an act of political convenience. It is the instinct of a community in fear of its life and in doubt of its future.
Now the chief agent in the coming fall of Mr. George is, as we have said, the revolt of the Conservative Party. Its allegiance to the Coalition is undermined, and any moment may see it formally withdrawn. The question is what part Labor and Liberalism are to play in the decree of eviction tvhich has gone out against the Government. The Tory Party, desires, beyond doubt, to manage England on anti-waste principles, and with a leader whom it trusts. We are afraid it is too much to hope that its choice will fall on an enlightened progressive like Lord Robert Cecil, or that the causes of free trade and liberty in Ireland would be safe in its hands. For that reason we should much prefer the more rational and enlightened alternative of a Government formed from the best elements in Labor, in Liberalism, and in the ranks of the free Conservatives. But that is an act of statesmanship to which at present neither Labor nor Liberalism has proved itself equal. In our view the Labor Party’s isolation has been a capital : error. The political power of i Labor depends on its industrial strength,. and in the storm which is coming that '.may be shaken to its foundations: ' But for the moment we are not in presence of a purely political movement, , to which we can freely apply the test of ideas or of definite > political principles. - The anti-wastrels do not associate Mr. George’s failure in government with his moral' defects,
with the blunder and the infamy of his policy on Reparations, or with the fearful errors he committed at Versailles. Tho country is simply frightened, and anxious, in its fright, to be rid of an adventurer, whom it begins to regard as a public danger. That is substantially true. Mr. George is a great political artist, and be has had the time of his life with the Sassenach. But in four years he has demoralised England and nearly ruined her, and she is fast making up her mind to have no more of him.
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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLVIII, Issue 35, 1 September 1921, Page 11
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1,690The Passing of Lloyd George New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLVIII, Issue 35, 1 September 1921, Page 11
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