Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P.

PHILIP GUEDALLA

The Significance of His Leadership of the Parliamentary Labor Party

WHEN history comes, as they say, to be written instead of being merely made by persons who have not read any, there will be something quite interesting to say about English politics. That, of course, is no guarantee that the historians will say it, because great topics have an unfailing attraction for small writers. The career of Napoleon is the chosen playground of mediocrities; his elder sister, the French Revolution, has been as unfortunate in her biographers as the rest of the family; and there is no particular reason why posterity should allot us a more inspiring interpreter. But if only the poor fellow could grasp the points, we should make very lively reading.

Politics since 1900 have been the British substitute for a revolution. There is a shrewd saying somewhere in the scattered wisdom of Mr. G. K. Chesterton that the greatest historical event of the Nineteenth Century was the English Revolution which omitted to take place between the years 1829 and 1832. One may add, without discourtesy, that his greatest historical work is the one which he has omitted to write about it. There, at any rate, in the years between Waterloo and the Reform Bill, was a corner which Great Britain managed to turn by political team-work, whilst almost every Continental contemporary preferred to swing round it on one wheel in the sharp movement of a revolution. There was some jolting, a little cracking of the whip, a faint apprehension among the more nervous passengers. But they managed somehow to prevent the leaders from kicking over the traces and to keep the vehicle on the road with King William on top of it; and the old gentlemen in the rumble continued to talk politics, whilst their neighbors on the Continent were talking barricades. It was unheroic; it was almost dull. But it was a method by which England managed to transform itself without the more dramatic cut and thrust of a revolution.

Revolution without Revolt

THAT, or something like it, has once again been the course of English politics in more recent times; and the historian will have much the same story to tell of Mr. Asquith and his sprightlier contemporaries as he had about Lord Grey and the men of the first Reform Bill. There is once more the slow drift of parties, the eddy of personalities which took the British Empire and its mixed cargo out of the world revolution of 19 . . . one forgets the date. The story is queer and crowded and full of earnest gentlemen in pince-nez. One can see the odd transformation of the Victorian scene which followed the Boer War, the marshalling of the new forces in the wings as Mr. Balfour lounged in the center of the stage, and then the slow surge of the crowds which filled the scene and elbowed the principals off the boards. One hopes that the ending, when it comes, will be a happy ending. But it is a strange story.

Unhappily for our pride, perhaps, we shall never read it because it is a dismal convention that history is never written until it is not worth reading. Most of us were taught at school that the story of mankind ended in the year 1832. A younger and more adventurous generation may have penetrated the jungle as far as 1886. It is even conceivable that in some of the more daring Infant Schools they have reached the accession of King Edward VII. But contemporary history will not be written until we are all past reading, and by a pleasing and recurrent irony it will be completely wasted on the generation which is privileged to study it. Patient researches will excavate all the mysteries that excite our wildest conjectures. The soul of Mr. Z, the secret motives of Sir W. V., the eternal riddle of Lord Y., will be laid bare before a roomful of bored students; and our masters will be eviscerated in an empty operating theater. The cornucopia of history will pour revelations in more than Rasputinian profusion before our dull-eyed descendants; and a languid posterity will turn an apathetic stare on the true story of Mr. Lloyd George. They will find Mr. Churchill and his Bolsheviks as dreary as King Alfred and the cakes; and aspirants to the doctorates of universities as yet undreamt of will present theses on the British Labor movement. One hastens, with the true humility of a mere contemporary, to submit a few notes for their guidance.

The movement (one shrinks from the admission in a study of its titular leader) is more remarkable for its facts than for its figures. There is something impressive in the evolution of British Socialism from an imported fad with a slightly German accent into the accepted doctrine of organized Labor; and the rapid expansion of the party, which once was almost covered by the brim of Mr. John Burns's straw hat, is a solid and significant fact. But in its progress through Terror (as Mr. Lloyd George used to say) to Triumph it has been strikingly unproductive of those figures by which Englishmen love to identify their political parties. In the days when Mr. Gladstone wore a collar and Lord Beaconsfield a forelock, it was so easy to be either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative. But Labor has been singularly sparing of such meretricious aids to the national memory. Refusing resolutely to be identified with the personal characteristics of Mr. Keir Hardie, it appears ever since to have selected its leaders according to their lack of idiosyncrasies. Inconspicuousness, in one-quarter of the House at least, seems to have been elevated into a political virtue. Whilst the Unionists chose a leader because he wore an eye-glass with hereditary aptitude, and Liberal statesmen vied with one another in the wild exuberance of their Gladstonian coiffure, Labor remained faithful to the less adventurous charms of Mr. Henderson and Mr. Clynes. Other parties might seek figure-heads in the rich pictorial manner of Sir John Tenniel and F.C.G. But Labor, so far as one can judge by results, has set its heart on a Front Bench designed by the sober pencil of Mr. George Morrow.

MacDonald's Articulate Leadership

MR. Ramsay MacDonald is a brave continuation of this austere tradition. In a party which abounds in rich curves and sudden contrasts of emotion (and even of color) he presents a plain rectangular appearance, a warning, it may be, to the more rococo figures to which other parties have vowed allegiance. Mr. H. G. Wells somewhere denounced the politics of the Nineteenth Century as a sort of procession of big-heads from a pantomime, and rejoiced over the disappearance of the Effigy. Perhaps we are arriving slowly at an age of pure reason, when the public will be equal to distinguishing the rival leaders of political thought by their ideas without relying, as at present it has come to rely almost entirely, on the competing achievements of their barbers and their tailors.

But Mr. MacDonald's leadership is more significant than that. He represents with rare completeness the articulate element of the Labor movement. Every party consists of a head and a tail, and it is almost always the head that does the talking. But in Labor there is a sharper contrast than elsewhere between the little sentient, speaking group at the top and the vast, unapproachable, inarticulate mass that votes by the hundred-thousand at card-votes in Trade Union Congresses. The head so manifestly, even a shade pretentiously, cerebrates; and the remainder of the party acquiesces with amazing completeness in the humbler functions of the body. Mr. Clynes and, before him, Mr. Henderson were vaguely typical of the body of the party. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald represents the head. It is a quarter from which few political parties have chosen their leaders since the Country Party acquiesced helplessly in Mr. Disraeli.

There has always been a faint touch of arrogance about Labor thought, a tendency in its leading thinkers to reply to argument with the superior snigger of the man who knows better. Perhaps they learned it at the Fabian Society. Conceivably it is a distant echo of the titter with which Mr. Bernard Shaw answers the riddle of the universe. But it is an unfortunate mannerism in statesmen. Long practice in the character of a disillusioned minority has impaired the charm of their expressions; they have sat for too long with curling lips, listening to the bandied futilities of effete and competing Capitalist disputants, to confront their future as national leaders with the open brow and the level eye of assured authority. There is an irritating tendency (one has seen it in the early history of most parties) to assume that decent motives and common intelligence reside solely within their own ranks. Suspicious of monopolies, they cherish a belief in their own monopoly of common-sense; and sometimes it takes the more fantastic form of an almost Islamic fanaticism, a hastily muttered creed that there is one economic way of salvation and one Prophet.

(Continued on page 78)

(Continued from page 49)

In the superior hierarchy of the faith, somewhere between the persistent cerebration of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and the hoarse-voiced idealism of the Daily Herald, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald has for long occupied an honorable position. His powers of speech endeared him to the dark masses of the rank and file to an extent unattainable by the busy typewriters of the Intellectuals; whilst a steady stream of little textbooks on Socialism demonstrated that he also was among the prophets. A visit to India was followed, as it so often is, by a complete grasp of Indian problems; and Mr. MacDonald added to the widening circle of his admirers that curious group of inverted Jingoes for whom the British Empire is a place upon which the sun is perpetually setting, and no Englishman, if he has committed the supreme indiscretion of entering the service of his country, car do right. The war added a more ques tionable contribution to his record, although it afforded to him (as to so many others in humbler but perhaps more useful capacities) the oppor tunity for a demonstration of high courage.

Himself a queer blend of conflicting elements, he is an apt leader of a party which is as fascinating an amalgam as Burke's tesselated pavement. He brings to the work a sense of dignity; and one can only hope that he will succeed in imparting to his friends a sense of proportion. One can never forget that, when a caricaturist of genius committed the supreme offence of depicting the Labor Party more as a human—all too human —being with a rather unsatisfactory moustache, than as a young man or woman of divine beauty and superhuman size, the Daily Herald charged him with bad taste, and that the accused of Mr. George Lansbury was Mr. Max Beerbohm