CHAPTER X THE POLITICIAN

The flower and exemplar of well-nigh everything that is choicely and brutally English may be summed up in the English politician. Such a tub-thumper, such a master of claptrap and the arts and feints and fetches of oratory, has never been known before since the world began. He is English, and therefore he knows his business. He has made a study of it as a business, and without regard to its more serious issues. His position is, that, if he would do himself well, he must tie himself hand and foot to some party, and serve that party through thick and thin. Then in the end, and with good luck, will come reward. You may be born in a chandler's shop. By birth, there[Pg 91]fore, you belong to the very lower English middle class. Through the practice of a number of commercial virtues, and with the help of considerable speculation outside your own business, you become wealthy. Now, wealth without honour is nothing to an Englishman. He cannot brook that his wealth, his shining, glorious superfluity, should be hidden under a bushel. Therefore he seeks municipal honours; he becomes a town councillor, an alderman, a mayor even.

But these, after all, are not the summits; they lead at best only to a common knighthood, and any fool can get knighted if he wants to. So you determine to seek Parliamentary honours. You subscribe liberally to the funds of your party, and by-and-by a constituency is found for you to contest. You lose the fight and subscribe again; another constituency is found for you, and you win by the skin of your teeth or with a plumping majority, as the case may be. You are now a full-blown member of Parliament; it is worth the money and[Pg 92] much better than being a mayor. Up to this time you have been an orator of sorts. You have held forth from schoolroom platforms and the tops of waggons what time the assembled populace shouted and threw up its sweaty nightcaps. You have been carried shoulder high behind brass bands rendering See, the Conquering Hero Comes. Now however, you are really in Parliament; and for the nonce—for several years, in fact—you must give up talking. There is plenty for you to do; you may put questions on the paper, you may get a look in at committee work, you may show electors round the Houses, and you may go on subscribing liberally to the party funds. When you have subscribed enough, it is just within the bounds of possibility that the heads of the party—the Front Bench people, as it were—will begin to discover that there is virtue in you. You will be encouraged to make a speech or two at the slackest part of debates, and some fine day you may be entrusted with the fortunes of a little Bill which your[Pg 93] party wishes to rush through. All the while you are subscribing liberally to the party funds. After many years, when you are least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall out of the universe—that is to say, there is a General Election. You have to fight your seat; you win; you come nobly back; behold, your party is in power. Then comes the grand moment of your life. You are shovelled into the Cabinet on account of services rendered. From this point, if you possess any ability at all, you can have things pretty much your own way; and if your ambition has been to hear yourself called "My lord" before you die, and to see your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great occasions, and your sons swanking about town with "Hon." before their names, you can manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves many years of hard work and lavish expenditure; but it is politically possible in England for a man to be born on the flags and to die properly set forth in Burke and Debrett.

I do not say for a moment that the end[Pg 94] and aim of every English politician is the peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his labours are directed towards some end of honour or emolument, and seldom or never to the good of the State. It is ambition, and not patriotism, that fires his bosom; it is self-aggrandisement, and not a desire for the welfare of the English people, that keeps him going; and it is party, and not principle, that guides and rules his legislative actions. Of course, the great art of being a politician is to hide these facts from the public. If you went down to your constituency like an honest man and said, "Gentlemen, I wish you to return me to Parliament in order that I may make a high position for myself, in order that I may become a man of rank and the founder of a family," your constituency would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you go down with an altogether different tale: "I am going to the House of Commons, gentlemen, in your interests and not in mine. It will cost me large sums of money; besides which, as your member, I shall be expected[Pg 95] to subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. But I have the best interests of Muckington at heart; and, if you honour me by making me your representative, money is no object."

It is a wonderful business, and a great and a glorious. One stands in astonishment before the bright English intelligence which takes so much on promise and gets so little performed. An English party never goes into power with the intention of doing more than half of what it has promised to do. At election times its great business is to capture votes: these must be had at any price short of rank bribery. And, once landed with the blest, the party immediately settles down, not to the work of carrying out its promises, but to the far more serious business of keeping itself in power. From the point of view of the careless lay-observer, the House of Commons is an assemblage for the discussion of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being managed in the best possible way. To the politician it is just an arena in which two[Pg 96] sets of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, ridicule, and bring about the downfall of each other.

The amount of interest the Englishman is supposed to take in this amazing assemblage and its doings makes it plain that the Englishman himself is well-nigh as foolish and well-nigh as oblique as the person whom he elects to represent him. Next to royalty itself there is nobody in England who can command so much attention and such a prominent place in the picture as the politician. If he be a Cabinet Minister of any standing, it is impossible for him to walk through the streets either of London or of any of the English provincial towns without being immediately recognised and "respectfully saluted"; whereas, if he happens to have come to any metropolitan district or provincial town on political business bent, he may depend upon being received at the proper point by the local authorities, supported by a guard of honour of the local Volunteers, and he may also depend upon[Pg 97] more or less of an ovation on his way to and from the place of meeting.

Year in and year out, too, the illustrated papers of every degree blossom with his latest photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motorcar; Mr. So-and-so playing golf; Mr. So-and-so and the King; Mr. So-and-so addressing the mob from the railway train,—these are pictures in which every Englishman has delighted from his youth up, and in which he will always find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As for the journals which live out of the personal paragraph, they must give—or imagine they must give—pride of place to the politician, or perish. Little anecdotes of the sayings and doings of the politically great are always marketable. It is not necessary that they should have the slightest foundation in truth; but they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and flattering to the personage involved.

It is when one turns to the English daily papers, however, that one begins to understand what an extraordinary hold the political interest has upon the English public[Pg 98] mind. It is well known that, in the main, the debates in the House of Commons are quite dull, colourless, and somnolent functions. Half of them take place in the presence only of the Speaker and a quorum. That is to say, nine nights out of ten, members spend the greater portion of their time in the smoke-rooms, dining-rooms, and lobbies, and not in the House itself, the simple reason being that, as a rule, the debates are not interesting. When some reputable champion of either party gets on his legs, or when some wag is up, members manage to attend in force; but it is only at these moments that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an English morning newspaper, you will find six columns of that sheet devoted to a report of the proceedings in Parliament; another three columns of descriptive matter bearing on the same proceedings; and, out of four or five leaders, three at least deal with the political question of the moment. Even when Parliament is not sitting, the first leader is never by any chance other than[Pg 99] political. From the point of view of the dull English mind, nothing more important than a political happening can happen in this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. Somebody else a liar across the floor of the House of Commons. It is essential for the well-being of the country at large that the episode should be reported with a separate subhead and great circumstance in the Parliamentary report; that the scene should be described by the lively and picturesque pen of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; that the appearance of the gentleman who called the other gentleman a liar should be dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of other gentlemen having called gentlemen liars across the floor of the House should also be given in the notes; and, finally, that a rotund and windy leader should be written, wherein is discussed gravely the general advisability of gentlemen calling other gentlemen liars across the floor of the House; wherein one is assured that, in spite of occasional regrettable instances of the kind, the[Pg 100] English Parliament is the most decorous and dignified assemblage under the sun; and wherein we cannot refrain from paying our tribute of respectful admiration to the Right Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good sense, and gentleman-like spirit, coupled with the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of the procedure of the House becoming to his high position, invariably enable him to still the storm and to repress the angry passions of our heated legislators before any great harm has been done. So that a gentleman who calls another gentleman a liar across the floor of the House of Commons really renders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch as he provides them with a gratuitous entertainment, about which they may read, talk, and argue for at least twenty-four hours.

Recognising their own love of politics and political strife, and knowing in their hearts that the talk in the House of Commons—not to mention the House of Lords—is, generally speaking, of the flattest and flabbiest, one would imagine that the wise English[Pg 101] would be at some pains to take measures calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary debates and render them of real interest. But no such precautions are taken. When a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, he is never by any chance asked if he is prepared, at the psychological moment, to pull the nose of one of the right honourable gentlemen opposite. Any member of Parliament who, in the middle of a dull debate, would walk across the floor and box the ears of, say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord Hugh Cecil, would thereby earn for himself the distinction of being the best-discussed and best-described man in England for quite half a week. Considering the small amount of exertion required for such a proceeding, and the very large amount of notoriety which would accrue to the person who ventured on it, one wonders that it has never been done.

In spite of the abnormal share of publicity and applause which is extended to the English politician, however, the solemn fact remains that he is seldom a person of any[Pg 102] real force, capacity, understanding, or character. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, inept, are the epithets which best describe him. He passes through the legislative chamber or chambers, says his say in undistinguished speeches, casts his vote, earns his place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes beyond our echo and our hail. The daily papers manufacture for him an obituary notice varying in length from five lines to a couple of columns, and nobody wants to hear anything more about him. As a matter of fact, he has left the world neither wiser nor wittier nor happier than he found it. If he has made one phrase or uttered one sentiment that sticks in men's minds, he is fortunate. Neither history nor posterity will have anything to say about him, though in his day he kicked up some fuss and took up a lot of room. In short, politics as a career in England is not a career for solid, serious men. It merely serves the turn of the specious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the vainglorious.