Chapter II: Redmond as Chairman (2)

From an Irish point of view the episode was noteworthy. At the outset of this critical session Redmond had cautioned his party to abstain from giving provocation and from allowing themselves to be provoked. The counsel was the harder to follow because some of the most vehement of the younger Tories sat below the gangway, almost in physical contact with Irish members, and hot words passed. Still, it was grounded into all that we should not allow the great issue then at trial to be represented as an Irish quarrel. Our cause was linked with the whole cause of democracy as against privilege: it was an issue for the whole United Kingdom; and that was never plainer than on this day of July. English, Scottish and Welsh members hurled interruptions and taunts at each other across the floor of the House, while Irish members sat watching. Something older and more far-reaching than the opposition to Ireland's demand now was felt itself assailed; and a force in which the Irish movement was only one stream of many swept against it. Anger in the Tory party was not directed against Ireland's representatives; and an odd chance made this plain. The fierce scene in the House reached its culmination when Ministers withdrew in a body from the Treasury Bench and the two sides of the House stood up, one cheering, the other hooting, in opposite ranks. For a moment it seemed as if the affair would come to blows, till Mr. Will Crooks, with a genial inspiration, uplifted his voice in song: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot?" The tension was relaxed and members moved out in groups--we Irishmen necessarily among the Tories. In the movement I saw Willie Redmond go up to one of the fiercest among the Ulstermen, whose face was dark with passion. Colloquy began: "Isn't it a hard thing that you wouldn't let us speak?" The Ulsterman turned: "Not let you speak? My dear fellow, we'd listen to you for as long as you liked--it's only these accursed English Liberals." And upon this mutual understanding the two Irishmen walked down the floor into the Lobby exchanging expressions of mutual goodwill and possibly of mutual comprehension.

This little piece of by-play, so full of Irish nature, struck me at the time as something more than amusing--as having in it a ray of hopeful significance. But the most sanguine imagination would never have foreseen the series of events which brought it to pass, not merely that these two men should wear the same uniform, on a common service, but that the same Gazette should publish both their names as enrolled on the same day in the French Legion of Honour. On that day Mr. Charles Craig was a prisoner in Germany, wounded in a famous fight; and Willie Redmond was in a grave towards which Ulster comrades had been the first to carry him. There is an Irish saying, "Men may meet, but the mountains stand apart." In July 1911 such an association as the Gazette of July 1917 illustrated would have seemed hardly more possible than the meeting of the everlasting hills.

The dramatic crisis of the parliamentary struggle between the two Houses of Parliament did not, and could not, come in the House of Commons. Its place was in the final citadel of privilege, and privilege surrendered on August 10th, when the Bill passed the Lords after the most exciting and uncertain division that is ever likely to be known. But there were elements in the Tory party which did not accept defeat, though they had not yet clearly decided on what battleground to renew their efforts. For the moment, however, men were disposed to pause and take stock of the new situation.

But at such a time events cannot stand still, and almost at the same moment as the Parliament Act was carried, the Government took a step which gravely affected the Irish party. Payment of members was established by a resolution of the House of Commons.

Irish Nationalist members had always been paid from the party fund, that is to say, by their supporters. Payment was conditional, not of right, and it was not made except when the member was in attendance: it amounted only to twenty pounds a month. The new payment came from the British Treasury; it was made irrespective of the desire of constituents, or of any other consideration; and it amounted to a sum which in a country of small incomes sounded very imposing. Unquestionably the receipt of it weakened the position of the party in the eyes of Ireland, and gave a new sting to the charge of a bargain.

All this was clearly discerned in advance, by no one more than by Redmond; and an amendment was moved to strike Irish members out of the application of the resolution. But the situation was hopelessly involved, the Irish party having repeatedly voted for payment of members as part of the Radical programme which they supported as affecting any normally governed country; and Government refused to make the exception.

As a result, Redmond's following lost much of the prestige which had resulted from scrupulous observance of the understanding that no Nationalist member should take office under Government. To join the Irish party had been, in effect, for most men, to make a vow of poverty. Now, on the contrary, it involved acceptance of what was in Ireland's eyes a well-paid and unlaborious office. The Irish are no less prone than any other nation to take a cynical view of these matters.

Yet assuredly no man ever gave more service for less pay than the Nationalist leader, and it was the harder because he was a man who liked comfort and had no ambition. If at the time of the great "split" he had stood down from politics, success would have been assured to him at the Bar in Ireland, or, more surely still, and far more profitably, at Westminster itself. There never was anyone so well-fitted for the work of a parliamentary barrister who has to deal with great interests before a tribunal largely composed of laymen. No one had the House of Commons tone more perfectly than Redmond, and no one that I ever heard equalled his gift for making a complicated issue appear simple. When he was thrown out of Parliament at the Cork election, he thought of retirement, mainly for one reason: it would be better for his children. Yet, first by personal loyalty to Parnell, later by his loyalty to Ireland, he was held firm to his task--always a poor man, always knowing that it lay in his power, without the least sacrifice of principle, to become rich by a way of work less laborious and infinitely less harassing than that which he pursued.

The effect upon the Irish situation produced by the payment of members was slow to develop, and obscure. But an obvious and grave complication was introduced into both British and Irish politics at the moment when the democratic alliance had achieved its first great objective. Parliament had been in session almost continuously since the beginning of 1909, with the added strain of two general elections thrown in. There was a widespread desire to clear the autumn of 1911, so that members might have some breathing space, and, not less important, devote themselves to propagandist work in their constituencies for the new struggle of carrying measures under the hardly won Parliament Act. Each of these measures must involve a fight prolonged over three years.

But this desire ran against the purposes of Mr. Asquith's chief lieutenant, whose power and popularity were now at their height. Mr. Lloyd George in the course of the session had introduced his Insurance Bill, and it was welcomed with astonishing effusion from both sides of the House. As discussion proceeded, however, the complexity and difficulty of its proposals, and the number of oppositions which they provoked, became so apparent that it was not in human nature for politicians at such a crisis to forgo the opportunity. Most of the Liberal party would have preferred to drop the Bill temporarily and refer it to a Committee of Enquiry. Mr. Lloyd George was convinced that this would be fatal to his measure, concerning which he was possessed by a missionary zeal. Probably when his career comes under the study of impartial history it will be perceived that never at any moment was he so passionately and so honestly in earnest as upon this quest. But it is certain that by pursuit of it he created enormous difficulties in the way of those reforms which the democratic alliance at large most desired to achieve. He carried his point; an autumn session followed, in which the mind of the electorate was diverted from the Irish question and all other questions except that of Insurance, and Parliament itself was jaded to the brink of exhaustion.

The matter was difficult for us in Ireland because, owing to the different system of Public Health Administration, many of the most important provisions could not apply, and because the Bill as a whole was framed to meet the needs of a highly industrialized and crowded community. Broadly speaking, it was less desired in Ireland than in Great Britain; and even for Great Britain Mr. Lloyd George was legislating in advance of public opinion rather than in response to it. Mr. O'Brien and his following vehemently opposed the application of the Bill to Ireland; and the Irish Catholic Bishops, by a special resolution, expressed their view to the same effect. The Bill, however, had a powerful advocate in Mr. Devlin, and the Irish party decided to support its extension to Ireland, subject to certain modifications which they obtained.

Apart from the new unsettlement of public opinion which it created both in Great Britain and in Ireland, the Insurance Act added to our difficulties on the Home Rule question. It was clear already that the question of finance lay like a rock ahead. Up to 1908 the proceeds of Irish revenue had always given a margin over the cost of all Irish services, though that margin had dwindled almost to vanishing-point. Old Age Pensions completely turned the beam and left us in the position of costing more than we contributed. Now the outlay on Insurance added half a million a year to the balance against us.

Still, difficulties and perplexities were not limited to one side. The Tory party were much divided since the crisis on the Parliament Act. A section, and the most active section, had been violently opposed to the surrender on the critical division, and these men were profoundly discontented with Mr. Balfour's leadership; so Mr. Balfour, yielding to intimations, suddenly resigned. Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr. Bonar Law was chosen to succeed him, Mr. Long and Mr. Chamberlain waiving their respective claims.

This choice was of sinister augury. Mr. Law did not know Ireland. But, Canadian-born, he came from a country in which the Irish factions and theological enmities had always had their counterpart; his father, a Presbyterian Minister, came of Ulster stock. All the blood in him instinctively responded to the tap of the Orange drum. As far back as January 27, 1911, he had urged armed resistance to Home Rule.

This was a line which Mr. Balfour did not see his way to take, and probably here rather than elsewhere lay the reason for the choice of Mr. Bonar Law. The most active section of the Tory party--probably a minority, for in such cases minorities decide--regarded the passing of the Parliament Act as an outrage on the Constitution, which should be resisted by any means, constitutional or unconstitutional. But no possibility existed of mobilizing a force in Great Britain to fight for the veto of the House of Lords, nor again did the resistance to a new Franchise Act, or even to Welsh Disestablishment, promise to be desperate. In one part only of these islands was there material for a form of struggle in which the ballot-box and the division lobby might be supplemented, if not replaced, by quite other methods of political war. The Tory party saw in Ulster their best fighting chance. There was no use in telling them that they jeopardized the British Constitution; from their point of view the British Constitution--as they had known it--was already gone; it was destroyed in principle and must be either restored or refashioned according to their mind.

This temper, with the attitude towards parliamentary tradition which it produced, rendered the political history of the next two and a half years unlike any other in the history of these countries. The main purpose of this book is to record and illustrate Redmond's action during the period which began with the opening of the Great War. But since that action was conditioned by the circumstances preceding the war--since in two notable ways it aimed at a solution of the fierce political struggle which the war interrupted--the political history connected with the passage of the Home Rule Bill through Parliament must be outlined in detail, with avoidance, so far as may be, of a controversial tone.

V

It is however necessary, before closing this preliminary review, to take some account of Redmond's relation to his party, and, in general, of the working of the parliamentary machine. Difficulties were imposed on him and on the party from 1910 onwards by our very success.

Electoral chances had placed us apparently in the position of maximum power. From January 1910 onwards we had a Government committed to Home Rule, yet so far dependent on us that we could put it out at any moment. Yet this was by no means an ideal state of affairs. The Government's weakness was our weakness, and they were liable to the reproach that they never proposed a Home Rule measure except when they could not dispense with the Irish vote. Still, from this embarrassing position we achieved an extraordinary result. Right across our path was the obstacle of the House of Lords. It was not an impassable barrier for measures in which the British working classes were keenly interested--for it let the Trades Disputes Bill go through; but it was wholly regardless of Irish and of Welsh popular opinion. Under Redmond's leadership we smashed the House of Lords. The English middle class instinct for compromise was asserting itself, when he took hold and gave direction to the great mass of popular indignation which the hereditary chamber had roused against itself.

Yet guiding action in an alliance of which he was not the head was delicate work. A clumsy speaker in debate might do infinite mischief. When a party is in opposition, all its members can talk, and are encouraged to talk, to the utmost; little harm can be done to one's own side by what is said in criticism of measures proposed. Support and exposition is a much more ticklish business. Add to this the fact that under the fully developed system of parliamentary obstruction--that is, of using discussion to prevent legislation from being put through--the best service that a member can render to Government is to say nothing, but vote.

The tactics of limiting discussion to chosen speakers in important debates and of discouraging sharply any intervention which might help to delay a division were pushed further in the Irish party than elsewhere. We were there under different conditions from the rest; our objective was as clearly defined as in a military operation: and we all understood the position. We recognized also that negotiation must be a matter for Redmond and his inner cabinet of three, and that many things could not be usefully discussed in a body of seventy men. But the net result was that the bulk of the party lost interest in their work, and, which was worse, that Ireland lost interest in the bulk of the party. It followed, not unnaturally, that the constituencies held one voting machine to be as good as another, and they did not generally send any men who could have been of service in debate. They did not any longer see their members heading a fiery campaign against rents, or flamboyant in attack on the Government; they heard very little of them at all. They knew little and cared less about the work of education in British constituencies, which had to be carried on through the mouths of Irish members.

Redmond has often been blamed, but quite unjustly, for failure to attract men of talent into his ranks. Parnell had that power. He had, and used, the right of suggesting names. But under the constitution of the United Irish League (originally the work of Mr. William O'Brien when reunion was accomplished in 1900) the machinery of local conventions was set up and no interference with their choice was permitted to the central directorate--which could only insist that a man properly selected must take the party pledge. Whether this machinery was inevitable or no, cannot be argued here; but Redmond himself complained repeatedly in public that it worked badly. Candidates were often chosen purely for local and even personal considerations, and seldom with any real thought of finding the man best fitted to do Ireland's work at Westminster.

This evil, for it was an evil, resulted from the political stagnation in a country where one dominant permanent issue overshadowed all others. There being no Unionist candidature possible in the majority of constituencies, any contest was deprecated--and from some points of view rightly--as leading to possible faction between Nationalists. The choice of a member really fell into too few hands; the electorate as a whole was not sufficiently interested. Nevertheless, several able men came into our ranks, and under the conditions it was not possible to utilize their talents fully, as they would have been utilized had we been in opposition, not in support of the Government. More could have been done, however, to give them their opportunity, and the responsibility for not varying the list of speakers rests on Redmond. It was his policy to avoid personal intervention, and to leave such choices to be settled by proposals from the party itself. This was a real limitation to his excellence as leader--for leader he was.

There was, however, an even more important limitation arising out of his personal temperament. As chairman, I never expect to see his equal. He had the most perfect public manners of any man I have known, whether in dealing with some vast assembly or small confidential gathering. The latter type of meeting is the more difficult to handle, and nothing could exceed his gift for presiding over and guiding debate. He could set out a political situation to his party with extraordinary force and lucidity. He could also, when he chose, so present an issue as to suggest almost irresistibly the conclusion which he desired--and this was how he led. Where he came short in the quality of leadership was in the personal contact.

His relations with all his followers in the party were courteous and cordial; yet without the least appearance of aloofness he was always aloof. He did not invite discussion. It needed some courage to go to him with a question in policy, and if you went, the answer would be simply a "Yes" or "No." He lacked what Lord Morley attributed to Gladstone, "the priceless gift of throwing his mind into common stock." No one thought more constantly, or further ahead; but he could not, rather than would not, impart his mind by bringing it into contact with others. Men like being taken into their leader's confidence, and he knew this and, I have reason to believe, knew the disability which his temperament laid upon him. Yet he never made an effort to combat it, partly I think from pride, for he hated everything that savoured of earwigging; he was not going to put constraint upon himself that his following might be more enthusiastic. There was no make-believe about him, and he was never one who liked discussion for discussion's sake.

Profoundly conservative, he had no welcome for novel points of view. I cannot put it more strongly than by saying that he was more apparently aware of the qualities which made T.M. Kettle difficult to handle in his team than of those which made that brilliant personality an ornament and a force in our party. A more serious aspect of this conservatism was the separation which it produced between him and the newer Ireland. He welcomed the Gaelic League and disliked Sinn Fein, but undervalued both as forces: he was never really in touch with either of them. Ideally speaking, he ought to have seen to it that his party, which represented mainly the standpoint of Parnell's day, was kept in sympathy with the new Young Ireland.

But from the point of view of those who shared his outlook--and they were the vast majority, in Ireland and in the party--Redmond's essential limitation, as a leader, was that he lacked the magnetic qualities which produce idolatry and blind allegiance. What his followers gave him was admiration, liking and profound respect. No less than this was strictly due to his high standard of honour, his scorn of all personal pettiness, his control of temper. In twelve years I heard many complaints of the manner in which things were managed in the party: I scarcely ever remember to have heard anyone complain of him. He was always spoken of as "The Chairman"; no one attributed to him sole responsibility; and he was the last on whom any man desired to lay a fault.

Yet when it came, as it often did, to a question of weighing advices one against the other, there was no mistake how men's opinions inclined. He had taught his party by experience to have almost implicit confidence in his judgment; and by this earned confidence he led and he ruled.