After all, I have heard much the same tone of religious veneration in those describing some stock-exchange swindle of our day, and a fortune made in a few weeks by the deception of the multitude and the ruin of a thousand families.
So there is still hope.
The authority and prestige of Parliament have sunk like water in a river lock, sogging away rapidly before our eyes.
The process should normally have been more rapid, and the ultimate crisis to which it should surely lead was due to come long before this.
It would have been much better for the country if it had so come. The Marconi scandal was an excellent opportunity for an explosion and a thorough clearing of the air. The far worse Dope scandal, taking place when the nation was fighting for its life, was perhaps the last chance offered. If half a dozen of the politicians and company promoters compromised in the Dope scandal had been openly tried and sent to penal servitude during the war, we should have been the better for it today. Instead of that the whole thing was hushed up, and the loot remained in the hands of the looters: an example followed by I know not how many others in the short seven years which have elapsed since that worst of abominations was condoned.
Perhaps the strongest brake that was put upon the pace downhill, the strongest force restraining a final collapse, and thereby condemning the country to the gradual and certain extinction of Parliamentary authority, lay in the momentum of the old Parliamentary prestige.
To an older generation, of whom some few survive, the idea of a seat in Parliament was connected with honour and a social position worthy of ambition. That generation carried on an admixture of the old tradition which only slowly died, and while it lasted supported the collapsing fabric with which it was intertwined.
Such men, before the present nastiness began, had already acquired a habit of the House of Commons, they lived in the thoughts and customs of an older and much better time, and lent to the diseased institution of their age the memories of its health during their own early youth and manhood.
Some very few still survive to lend the corruption of professional politicians a remnant of moral support. When they are gone we shall have the problem to face in full as we have not yet had to face it.
Of those men who had thus obtained a habit of the House of Commons, as it were, and who for long lent it a fictitious value which it had long ceased to possess, I would particularly recall—for I followed his public action closely and often discussed it with him—Sir Charles Dilke.
He belonged, of course, to an older time, when politics were still respectable and even dignified, and, having begun to take root in them much earlier in life, he felt acutely the wastage of his powers—for he could never have office. But he was treated by the Chair as a sort of Elder Statesman, and I shall always remember the solidity and detail of his experience in foreign affairs. He was one of the very few men of my time (overlapping from an older time) who knew what he was talking about when he discussed the Continent, and who followed the change which was taking place over all Western Europe; and he could value the degree and the quality of it in each country, or at least in the Germanies, in France, in Italy, and in Belgium. Spain he discussed less, and I do not know what his measure of acquaintance was with Spanish affairs. I always count his evidence as valuable in the interesting discussion upon the origin of Gambetta. He knew Gambetta well, and did not despise him. He said that he was a Jew, and that, therefore, he was quite alien to the French temper. That, of course, was also the thesis of many of Gambetta’s enemies (for Liberals always seem to think that they are saying something unpleasant about a man when they say that he is of Jewish race), but it was not the testimony of most of his friends. Two of Gambetta’s friends I knew well enough: one was a relative of mine, the other was that very great man, Déroulède. I do not think Déroulède was a very accurate observer, but at any rate he testified to the intensely national quality of Gambetta, and swore that there was nothing Oriental about him at all. My own relative, who was of a more cynical temper, said that he was certain of the same thing from careful observation. Gambetta seems to have been a man who commanded real and profound affection, but his legend will be distorted, for it is one of the curses of the modern political chaos that those who by accident or by their desire enter its whirlpool of personal competition and consequent advertisement must inevitably be betrayed by fate. Not one of them can appear as he is, and not one of them will ever be taken by posterity to have anything of greatness about him, however great he may be, unless he can exercise some talent outside the wretched parliamentary business into which he has been caught up.
There is in that life such an admixture of violence, cunning, and bombast, quite apart from the money taint, that a man’s name becomes a mere label for hatred and ridicule in places where the struggle is taken seriously, as it is in France or in Ireland. It becomes a mere label for playacting and make-believe in a country such as ours, where politics are not taken seriously.
No English Parliamentarian could suffer the legacy of hatred, virulent contempt, and
