The Mirrors of Downing Street Part 10

On many occasions I have discussed with him the future of mankind. I have found him the least anxious and always the most self-possessed observer of events. Quiet, patient, practical, and imaginative, inspired too by humane motives, he cherishes the unshakable faith that Great Britain is destined to lead civilization into the future as far as human eye can see. He places his faith in British character. Rivalry on the part of powerful nations, even when it is directed against our key industries, does not disturb him in the least. While others are crying, "How shall we save ourselves?" he is pushing the fortunes of the British race in every quarter of the world. And where British trade goes, on the whole there goes too the highest civilizing power in the world--British character. It is significant of his faith that he has ever worked to get the British mercantile marine manned by men of the British race, and to this end has led the way in improving the conditions of the British seaman's life.

"All the fallacies and wild theories of revolutionary minds," he once said to me, "break ultimately on the rock of industrial fact. The more freely nations trade together the more clearly will it be seen that humanity must work out its salvation within the limits of economic law.

And the way to a smooth working out of that salvation is by recognizing the claims of the moral law. We are men before we are merchants. There is no reason why mistrust should exist between management and labour.

The economic law by no means excludes, but rather demands, humaneness. I believe that a system of profit sharing can be devised which will bring management and labour into a sensible partnership. Selfishness on the part of capital is as bad as selfishness on the part of labour. Both must be unselfish, both must think of the general community, and both must work hard. The two chief enemies of mankind are moral slackness and physical slackness."

There is no man living who would make a better Chancellor of the Exchequer than this merchant prince who, however, has had enough of politics and is going back very gladly to his desk in the City. He is not in the least soured by the public ingrat.i.tude, and rightly judges it to be rather the voice of unscrupulous and stunt-seeking journalism than the considered judgment of the nation. But he has a very poor opinion of the way in which the Government of the country conducts its business.

LORD LEVERHULME

LORD LEVERHULME, 1ST BARON (WILLIAM HESKETH LEVER)

Born 1851, Lancashire. Educ.: Bolton Church Inst.i.tute; Chairman of Lever Bros., Port Sunlight; High Sheriff, Lancaster, 1917.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LORD LEVERHULME]

CHAPTER XIII

LORD LEVERHULME

_"Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organized and more naturally cohesive_ inter se. _So the Arctic volcano can do nothing against Arctic ice."_--SAMUEL BUTLER.

The reader may properly wonder to find the figure of Lord Leverhulme brought before the mirrors of Downing Street.

But let me explain why I introduce this industrial Triton into the society of our political minnows.

Lord Leverhulme rejected politics only when politics rejected him. He is of that distinguished company to whom the House of Commons has turned both a deaf ear and a cold shoulder. He failed where Mr. Walter Long succeeded, and fell where Dr. Macnamara rose.

I once asked a Cabinet Minister how it was that a man of such conspicuous quality had failed to win office. "I really cannot tell you," he replied with complacency, "but I remember very well that the House of Commons never took to him. It is curious how many men who do well outside the House of Commons fail to make good inside."

Curious indeed! But more curious still, we may surely say, that the House of Commons should continue, in the light of this knowledge, to enjoy so good an opinion of itself.

I suppose that n.o.body will now dispute that Lord Leverhulme is easily the foremost industrialist, not merely in the British Isles, but in the world. I can think of no one who approaches him in the creative faculty.

Not even America, the country of big men and big businesses, has produced a man of this truly colossal stature. Mr. Rockefeller is a name for a committee. Mr. Carnegie was pushed to fortune by his more resolute henchmen. But Lord Leverhulme, as is very well known in America, has been the sole architect of his tremendous fortunes, and in all his numerous undertakings exercises the power of an unquestioned autocrat.

Mr. Lloyd George once remarked to me that the trouble with Lord Leverhulme is that he cannot work with other men. But this is only true in part. Lord Leverhulme can work very well with men who are not fools.

When I told him of Mr. Lloyd George's remark, "Well, I don't know," he replied, "I have been working with other men all my life!" Yes, but this, too, expresses only part of the truth. He has been working with these other men as an accepted master.

It is not so in politics. There a man of power cannot pick and choose his colleagues. He must work with fools as well as men of ability. And never can he work as a master. Always at the Cabinet table he will find a cabal of deadheads opposed to the exercise of his authority, and in the department over which he is set to rule a bunch of traditional Barnacles, without one spark of imagination between them, who will fight his new ideas at every turn.

The essence of politics and government is mediocrity. The good sense of the House of Commons is a conspiracy to resist genius and to enthrone the average man. A department of the State is well governed only when its chief Civil Servant, by the grace of G.o.d, chances to be a man of statesmanlike capacity.

Like Lord Rhondda, Lord Leverhulme was approached by the Government during the numerous crises of the war to render service to the State.

His experience in this respect confirmed his judgment that our system of government is a chaos which would hardly be tolerated in a business establishment of the second cla.s.s. I will give an incident.

It was a matter of grave urgency to the Government that margarine should be manufactured in this country. A Cabinet Minister begged Lord Leverhulme, on the score of patriotism, to set up such a factory. Lord Leverhulme expressed his willingness to take up the project, but said that he must go to the public for a certain sum of money to carry it out. The Cabinet Minister made no demur to this very natural proposal, but suggested that it might be well if Lord Leverhulme would call at the Treasury and inform them of his purpose.

Accordingly the great industrialist, able as was no other man in this particular to serve his country's need, called humbly at the Treasury for permission to ask the public for capital. He was received by an official who refused point-blank to listen to such a proposition. Lord Leverhulme mentioned again the name of the Cabinet Minister who had requested him to embark on this venture. This was nothing to the official. He had nothing to do with other departments. His business was to see that the public's money came to the Treasury; he was certainly not going to countenance the raising of money for an industrial purpose.

You could no more have got into this gentleman's head than you could have got into the head of a rabbit the idea that money invested in an essential industrial undertaking pays the State far better than money advanced to it at the cost of five per cent.

Not to weary the reader with an incident, however telling, the end of this affair was that after going backwards and forwards between a Cabinet Minister and a Treasury official, Lord Leverhulme was at last permitted to ask the public for a small sum of money which he himself considered inadequate for the Government's purpose.

I have never heard him speak bitterly of his political experiences, but I have never heard him express anything but an amused contempt for the antiquated machinery which pa.s.ses amongst politicians for a system of government.

The English [he says] have pushed their fortunes, never by the aid of Government, but on the contrary almost always in the teeth of Government opposition. There is no man so lacking in imagination as a Government official, and no man, unless it is a banker, so wanting in courage as a Cabinet Minister. The wealth of England is the creation of her industrial population. The brains, the faith, the energy of the capitalist, and the brains, the loyalty, the strength of labour, these have made us the first nation of the world. There has been only one real obstacle in our path. Not foreign compet.i.tion, for that is an incentive, but the cowardice and stupidity of Governments. We possess an empire unrivalled in its opportunities for trade and commerce, an empire which, you would surely think, could not fail to inspire a statesman with great ideas. But what happens? We have a Government which thinks it has exhausted statesmanship by crippling industry at home in order to pay off our war debt as quickly as possible. Instead of setting itself to create more wealth, with the wealth of the world lying at its feet, it sets itself to dry up the sources of wealth at the centre of the empire. But it is no use talking. One thing a Government in this country cannot stand is imagination; and another is courage. The British Empire is in the hands of a lot of clerks--and timid clerks at that. We must do our best to get along without statesmanship at the head.

The reader may not remember that some years before Mr. Lloyd George plunged into a disordered series of social reforms, Lord Leverhulme, sitting in the House of Commons, introduced Bills of a reasonable and connected character to ensure workmen against unemployment and to set up a system of old age pensions. He did not enter Parliament for his own glorification. He had nothing to gain, but much to lose, by devoting himself to the business of Westminster. But he believed that he could benefit the State as a legislator, and he entered Parliament with the definite intention of introducing order into what was self-evidently a condition of dangerous chaos. He had a remedy for slums, a remedy for unemployment, a remedy for the poverty of the workman in old age, and a remedy for the educational deadlock. Further, he cherished the hope that he might do something towards developing the wealth and power of the British Empire, without impairing the spirit of individualism which, in his faith, is the driving power of British fortune.

How many men who entered the House of Commons with no ideas at all have been taken to the friendly bosom of that a.s.sembly? Moreover, can the reader name with confidence one Cabinet Minister in the past twenty years who can fairly be compared in creative genius with this remarkable man to whom the House of Commons refused the least of its rewards?

I saw Lord Leverhulme on several occasions at the end of the war. He spoke to me with great freedom of his ideas in the hope that I might carry them with effect to the Prime Minister. He proved to me that it was the nonsense of a schoolboy to talk of making Germany pay for the war, and suggested that the Prime Minister's main appeal to the nation at the General Election of 1918 should be a moral appeal for unity in the industrial world. He had one master word for that great moment in our history. It was the word "Production."

I found this word unpopular in Downing Street. Mr. Lloyd George was more mindful of Lord Northcliffe than of one "who cannot work with other men." And so the word went forth to the British peoples: Germany must pay for the war and the Kaiser must be tried. At the eleventh hour before the election there was no equivocation. Germany _should_ pay for the war. The Kaiser _should_ be tried. Instead of a great moral appeal, which might have prevented all the disastrous conflicts in industry, and might have preserved the spirit of loyalty which had united the people during the war, the Prime Minister put himself at the head of a disreputable mob calling for revenge.

"One disadvantage of the democratic system," says Mr. Birrell, "is that a Prime Minister no longer feels himself responsible for good government. He awaits a 'mandate' from a mob who are watching a football match."

We have only to compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord Leverhulme's to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside.

Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is a.s.sured of the ear of the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a Minister of State. But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and creative minds is the field of commerce.

The danger of the State from this condition of things is, unhappily, not only the loss of creative statesmanship at the head of the nation--serious as that is. The danger is greater. Small men are more likely to fall into dishonest ways than big men. There lies, I think, our greatest danger. It seems to me, observing our public life with some degree of intimacy, that there is a growing tendency for the gentleman to fall out of the political ranks and for his place to be filled by the professional politician, who in many cases appears to be almost entirely without moral principle. What can become of such a movement save eventual corruption? At present our politics are stupid but fairly honest. There are still representatives of the old school in the House of Commons. But the conquering advance is from the ranks of professionalism.

I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a heaven-sent genius of statesmanship. The British const.i.tution is twelve men in a box, and the very spirit of that arrangement is distrust of the expert. Moreover, there is wisdom in the Eastern legend which says that in making genius the fairies left out one essential gift--the knowledge of when to stop.

Whether Lord Leverhulme would have made a better statesman than, let us say, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman or Mr. Bonar Law it is surely certain, I think, that a true statesman would have made every conceivable use of his unusual mind. This, as I look at things, is the ideal method of government. I do not believe in the business man as statesman. I believe in the trained, cultured, and incorruptible gentleman as statesman, and the business man as his adviser.

But until our politics are of a higher order we can hardly expect the best minds in the nation to feel any attraction to a political career.

More and more the professional politician, the narrow man, the man of the loud voice and the one idea, the man who has few instincts of honesty in his mind and no movement of high and disinterested patriotism in his soul, will press himself upon the attention of democracy and by intimidating his leaders and brow-beating his opponents force his way onward to office.

The consideration of this grave peril to the moral character of our public life brings me to my brief conclusion.

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XIV