One point of view was presented to me by a wise old gentleman who had spent about thirty years (doing nothing) in the House of Commons and then wangled a peerage (for nothing) out of his colleagues; for he desired to live on under the same roof and to spend the last of his days amusing himself—remaining an indulgent spectator of what was still, to him, a slightly interesting affair.
It was on the evening of a day when I had been trying hard to dig one of the more noisome of the politicians out of the earth in which he had taken refuge after a particularly unpleasant affair. The old fellow had watched the process with an active amusement, and I think he was grateful to me for having provided him with an entertaining day. He had been watching from the gallery, but that evening, as I dined with him, he warned me against wasting too much energy in such a pastime.
I assured him that it was no pastime—that I took it very seriously indeed.
“I know you do,” he answered, “and that is just what I am warning you against. The country is carried on not by these fellows,” jerking his thumb towards the door, “but by the general activity of its people: that people is sound and will come well out of any ordeal.”
The war proved him right.
“What the mass of the people do not do for themselves,” he said, “is done by a rather too large but very conscientious body of permanent officials, underpaid, industrious, and exceedingly competent. The politicians are only the scum on the top; they have very little to do with the happiness or the unhappiness of the nation, and not much to do with its strength. Even the points of policy are, as a rule, decided outside their circle in the weightier financial world. It is a waste of energy to draw that covert too long.”
There is a great deal to be said for the old boy’s attitude. But I could not help asking him what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had been faced with a Chancellor of the Exchequer taking shares over the breakfast-table; for he remembered Mr. Gladstone well, and had for him that odd half-worship which so many men who knew that powerful, short, oratorical genius of a better past were smitten with. I said, “In Mr. Gladstone’s time the Secretaries of State had more privacy than our modern politicians, and their actions interfered less with the general life of England than they do today: with the permanent officials far less; yet you know as well as I do what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had found a member of his Government taking shares from a company promoter over the breakfast-table.”
The old man answered to this that the standard was altogether higher in his own youth than it was now, and that though he could not deny that Cabinet Ministers’ present habit of taking money was a weakness to the country, yet he thought it a small weakness. He added a thing which I have since discovered to be profoundly true, “At any rate, it cannot be remedied, and so you are wasting your time.”
In all the discussions—far too many!—in which I have engaged upon this subject I found only one really enthusiastic defender of the system, and that was a wealthy young Anglo-American who either just had taken up, or was just about to take up, a place in public life. To him our present way of going on had a sort of special excellence peculiar to this country and worthy of Bacchic praise. He spoke like a man who has come into a promised land, and he was moved to indignation by my criticisms against certain recent events. He applauded a Cabinet Minister who had just given a valuable monopoly to a company promoter and then resigned, and accepted a permanent highly salaried post in that company: for he repudiated any connection between the selling of the monopoly and the immediate subsequent acceptation of the salary. He was indignant that such a connection should be dreamt of. They were separate acts.
First the politician, in his capacity of public servant, honestly weighing all the pros and cons, decides that a company promoter is the right man to have a great public monopoly—worth millions. He gives him that monopoly. There the matter ends.
Then begins quite another set of actions. The politician as a private individual accepts a highly salaried post in the pay of the said company promoter and lives on the profits of the monopoly.
Only insane suspicion could connect the two acts.
It was a startling theory to hear: it was also completely new to me. But it had this advantage: it made him a contented supporter of that which others either laughed at cynically or held their tongues about.
I shall be interested to see, as I grow older, whether this type of defence develops, and whether we shall find the taking of bribes and the levying of blackmail a matter, not for commonplace acceptance, but for indignant praise. I do not think that we shall have much of that argument. It is exotic. No man of our blood is really comfortable in the presence of financial corruption. He may tolerate it: he may practise it; but it does not fit in with his conscience, still less excite his enthusiasm.
However, one never knows. There are very vile commercial transactions which certainly excite admiration today as surely as they would have excited in our fathers the determination to hang the culprit. Laxity in the relations between men and women which our fathers would at least have condemned is today not so much condoned as defended and made into a sort of religion. Direct treason in time of war merits a few months in the second division. So it is on the cards that I shall live to hear men say in awestruck tones, “What a fellow Binks
