Part 21

To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared. Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.

No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago, when Italy was first rising to her modern position. _Then_ the English papers closely followed all the ferment in Italy. It was to their columns that foreign statesmen turned for the facts and news on the progress of Savoy. To-day no Continental statesman looks at our press, save now and then to protest against some childish blunder. Again, even as I write, there is taking place in London a highly important conference between the bankers and politicians, the object of which, on the one side, is to diminish French power and, on the other, to maintain it. I turn to the ‘Temps,’ or to the ‘Corriere,’ and I find in the first paper very full and detailed accounts of the debates of the committees with an adequate educated judgment upon the results attained. In the second paper, I find a good, balanced judgment upon the situation with a leaning towards the English interest regarded as nearly identical with the Italian. But I defy any one to make out from ‘The Times’ what is really going on at that conference! You will read plenty of abuse of the French; plenty of self-praise and acres of generalities. But you will not find yourself informed—although the great business is going on here in London right under our eyes.

I thought it the part of a contemporary to follow the affair as closely as I could. I soon found it necessary to give up looking at the English papers, and to buy the papers of the Continent in order to instruct myself. The method had the disadvantage of delay, but had the advantage of giving me real information. The few papers which still keep up the façade of culture in their form, though certainly not in their contents, are, again, of less importance than the new popular press which makes no pretence to culture in any form, which is owned by impossible adventurers, such as no one a generation ago would have had in his house, even had they then existed;and it is this popular press now which is the main instrument in the moulding of opinion.

The revolution is complete. It is as complete as though the education of the country were to pass from the hands of the classicists and the mathematicians to those of Big Business, and boys were to be taught advertisement and salesmanship instead of the humanities. And this our passing from one mode of public expression, and control by suggestion, to another utterly different and far baser system, has come silently and has worked its effect unnoticed. It is only by contrasting _then_ with _now_ that we notice it.

We are arrived in England to-day at a condition in which the popular newspaper gives its owner a power in the State comparable only to the power of finance and far superior to the nominal power of those poor play-actors, embarrassed, furtive, who still bear titles of authority: Secretaries of State for this or that. And yet, by the very nature of the organism, this new instrument of power, the mob press, must be ill-informed, unreal, and—what is not without its importance—morally vile.

Less obvious than the complete change in the press, in its functions and character, perhaps less pronounced and less advanced, yet certainly of great moment, is the fall of the House of Commons and of Parliament in general from authority and dignity to well-deserved contempt.

But for this evil there is more hope of remedy than there is for the evil of the press. When any organ of government reaches a certain degree of decay, some other automatically takes its place, and if the substitution is made promptly enough, the state may bridge over the passage without disaster.

Such substitution lies ready to our hand. We have only to increase the power of the Crown, and that would indeed give truth to the boast too often repeated that the continuity of names is valuable to society. The monarchy is still there in name, and the giving of true power to it is therefore still possible.

The decline of Parliamentary authority and dignity has been wholly a rot from within. The people of England did not desire it; they desired nothing better than to continue their old respect for that aristocratic institution at Westminster round which every activity of the nation had centred. The damage was done by permitting personal corruption to go unpunished. When once the habit arose of condoning the use of public position for private enrichment—and that secret—it was impossible for the strength of the institution to survive. The temptation of the politician to enrich himself at the expense of the public good (to take bribes, to sell monopolies and contracts and policies) is so very strong that, unless it is met by as strong a check of discipline, it is bound to run riot, and it has done so. It has come on in a flood, especially during the last twenty years, taking every conceivable form, but all those forms proceeding from the immunity of the evil-doers. Men possessed of political power create public monopolies which they handle for their own enrichment: they take bribes, they give out contracts as against payment. They will assign a valuable state right to some company and then, resigning office, take up a highly salaried post in that company. The traffic in honours for the private advantage of those who bestow them is the least of these cancers which are eating away the body of Parliament. The habitual practice of blackmail in the course of personal intrigue for power (it is mutual between the politicians and the newspaper-owners) is the worst. But all are excessive in degree, and between them they have done their work. It is now impossible to restore to politics, which are now professional politics, the old prestige. It is gone.

In the presence of these experiences, the commonplaces of Parliamentary life with which all Parliamentarians are thoroughly familiar, and which at last the public are learning, the attitude of the politicians themselves is one of tolerance: the attitude of the public is a weary and disdainful indifference.

This attitude of tolerance on the part of the politicians, this policy they have chosen of excusing and pardoning corruption, seems to me more worthy of discussion than anything else in public life to-day; it is the centre of the whole affair.

Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government. Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption. So long as men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, for ever—so long you will have corruption present among those who govern, except under a strong king. It stands to reason that the appetite for wealth or notoriety or both will incite men in political power to obtain them, and as that power gives them in a large measure control of the courts of justice and full control of the police and of prosecution, they can be rendered in the main immune from the consequences of their actions. I should not think it remarkable to learn that in any country, at any time, there was very great corruption among the public men. What I should think remarkable, what I should think a phenomenon worthy of special study (because it would be exceptional and would necessarily produce exceptional results), would be to hear that the corruption was not punished, and that those who were caught and exposed in flagrant acts of corruption were actually promoted. That is what we have here to-day in England.

It is with the toleration of parliamentary corruption as it is with disease in the human body. Hardly anybody goes through life without some bad illness. Most people have some one or other specific weakness which develops into a long illness ending in death, and all human beings whatsoever are liable to disease, even those few who do not for the moment suffer from it. But everywhere you see the human race fighting disease, and trying to avoid its consequences. Now if you found a man who took his disease as a habit, and tended rather to accentuate it and foster it, you would think his action abnormal. You would say, ‘Certain strange consequences will follow upon this.’ And you would be right.

I have found the modern toleration of bribery and blackmail in politics to be defended with very different arguments, but I fancy that the underlying motive of the defence, the real basis of it in a Parliamentarian’s world, is patriotism combined with a certain new scale of moral values which has come in with the century. I fancy all those who have in my hearing defended this later-day toleration of corruption, really had at the back of their heads a conviction that such degradation of public life did the country no great harm, being no more than a sort of permanent necessary evil. They think that the lessening of the security of the state which would come from exposing and punishing the culprits a much greater evil than letting them go their way. It is something of the attitude which most people take towards a family scandal. They say: ‘These things will happen anyhow; and we shall lower the family by any public discussion of them.’ So say the more reputable at Westminster.

There are then, as I see it, two elements in the now admitted and universal toleration of bribery and blackmail among politicians. The first element is the noble element of patriotism which judges that of two evils you must choose the least, and that the evil of a certain minimum necessary amount of political vice is far less than the evil of shaking authority and order in society and at the same time weakening the country in the face of its rivals. The second element is the judgment that the levying of and submitting to blackmail, and the offering and taking of bribes among Parliamentarians is only one out of hundreds of moral evils in the state, and is one of the least.

If these be the real foundations of the tolerance of these evils, the artificial arguments advanced are many and varied. I remember one political dinner table in Surrey where we thrashed out the whole business at some length. Everybody present was connected with public life directly or indirectly, and no one, so far as I know, was himself or herself guilty. Yet, out of twenty, only three of us, of whom I was one, maintained the necessity of checking the evil. All the others, the remaining men and, of course, _all_ the women, relied upon this argument: that what you wanted in the conduct of the state was ability, sound judgment of the elements in any problem to be dealt with, and a good forecast of the immediate future. If you had these, they said, the country prospered; lacking these, any disaster might come. If you got these qualities in those who governed, it did not matter whether they were also given to peculation, or to odd tricks of spying and threatening, or to selling policies and monopolies, or to taking bribes.

I think that answer would have been sound if you could have proved that there was some necessary connection between good judgment, resolute will, patriotism, and all the rest of it, and the particular vices in question. For instance, a man defending the luxury and worldliness of a religious hierarchy might very well say: ‘These are moral evils, no doubt; but you will hardly get men able to conduct a great organisation who shall at the same time be indifferent to pomp and pleasure.’ But I would contend that in the case of Parliamentary life the connection does not apply. The kind of man who advances by taking or giving bribes, especially the man who advances by taking bribes, the kind of man who spends his energy in ferreting out the secret actions of rivals and then threatening them with exposure if they continue to compete with him, is not the kind of man who will normally have good judgment. Such men are, as a rule, of a very base sort intellectually, and the vices from which they suffer are the vices of small, uncertain, and despicable minds. If I wanted a man to manage a great business with foresight, strong will, and a good understanding of the elements of the problems before him, I might choose him in spite of a record for cruelty or pride—two very detestable vices. But I should be unwise to choose him if he had a record for petty peculation and perpetual intrigue among his fellows. Men suffering from these vices do very well in the lower ranks of the secret police, but they are unfitted for high position. Indeed, we have had experience in the last few years, and very rude experience, of what happens when you give such men even a small part of the governing power in the state. It was such men who judged, for instance, that the Jewish Communist revolution in Hungary would succeed. It was such men who supported the Greek adventure against Turkey, and it was such men who capitulated to Ireland.

Another argument I have heard advanced is this: that corruption on a far larger scale was vigorous during all the lifetime in which England was rising to its modern position of a Great Power.

From Walpole to the younger Pitt, from the South Sea Bubble to the Act of Union, public life was conducted universally upon a system of bribes. No one can deny that these were the years during which the modern greatness of England was founded; therefore (it is advanced) there is something quite out of proportion in fussing about a modern Chancellor of the Exchequer taking a few thousand shares across the breakfast-table, or a modern Postmaster-General signing a contract in favour of some private company and then taking a highly paid post with that company as his reward; for, if a very much more extended system of bribery did the country no harm in its formative period, we have nothing to fear from little individual peccadilloes in the way of taking a few thousands here and there, as is the habit of our public men to-day.

I fully agree that if the bribery were of the same quality in both cases, this argument would be sound. But the whole point of the affair is that the bribery is of a different kind.

The corruption of the eighteenth century was the purchase by those who controlled honours (and in a large measure the public purse) of votes in support of their policy; at the same time it was the open grasping of lucrative sinecures and large salaries by those in power.

An eighteenth-century aristocrat would give his dependent a lucrative sinecure, or a position in which he was free to accumulate great sums; he and his would vote themselves an exaggerated salary; he would vote out of the taxes great sums to his colleagues, and he would take many private opportunities for enriching himself, as the natural action of a man possessed of the power to do so through a public post.

But your eighteenth-century aristocrats who gave the tone to all that system, the big squires of the time, and the great merchants whom they digested into their body, were neither influenced in policy nor lowered in dignity by what they did. They did not profess to be acting otherwise, they did not put themselves into an absurd position, nor live in panic of exposure. A man would take money or honours as the wages of voting for the Government, but members of the Government themselves would not habitually take money in order to advantage company promoters who desired to fleece the public. There were occasional examples of this sort of thing, but it was not normal. You cannot imagine Walpole, for instance, or the younger Pitt, at either end of the period, taking money from a chance financial adventurer who should have come to him to get a new duty put on, or an old duty taken off, or a new kind of monopoly invented, whereby to fill his pockets.

I cannot imagine a man going to the younger Pitt, and saying: ‘My brother who is your colleague in the Government and I have a project for fitting sailing-ships with such-and-such a device. If you will help us to make it a law that all British ships shall carry this device and purchase it from us, we will give you a share in the proceeds.’ Our modern politicians act in this fashion; and, what is perhaps worse for the authority of Government, they do so in a fashion which makes them ridiculous: they loudly protest their innocence on the eve of exposure, and live always in some trepidation, and in a sort of incessant wrestling match with those who could make their lives intolerable by public insistence on their little habits.

Here is, I think, the core of the whole matter. Those patriots who rightly think they serve the country by strengthening the authority of even nominal governors, but who are persuaded that the toleration of political vice strengthens such authority, make in this second postulate of theirs a very obvious error. It is an error which they would not make, I think, if they lived the life of their fellow citizens and knew the average Englishmen better than they do.

All politicians live a life apart from the general mass of the less wealthy, less privileged classes, though they themselves are so largely drawn from these strata. It is astonishing when one hears them talking among themselves to discover how remote they are from the general interests of the public, and how seriously they take their own sham divisions and sham battles, and with what strange simplicity they believe that these sham battles are of vast moment to the electorate. The public as a whole is now fully acquainted with the nastiness and degradation of public life. It certainly does not appreciate the ultimate consequences of these, but at any rate it is no longer under any illusions. Indeed, my experience is that the ordinary member of the public, the average man in the liberal professions and in commerce, rather exaggerates the evil than otherwise, although he does not recognise its danger. He is ready to believe that pretty well any politician may be found taking money, and he does not distinguish as he should between the two sharply different types of Parliamentarians: those with a dirty record of their own, and those with a clean record who permit and support the dirt in the midst of which they live. For it must be admitted that public life is full of men who would never dream of themselves doing such actions as have come to mark their profession as a whole; but these men do not on that account stand excused. They support the nastiness in the midst of which they live; they refuse to correct it; they even, as a rule, join those who would prevent its exposure. They are accessories to all those acts which they not only personally despise and are disgusted with, but which in private they denounce. For they could put an end to the system if they preferred justice to their own little careers and the general good of England to their personal ease or notoriety.

Sometimes they try to salve their consciences by substituting a general for a particular condemnation—the oldest device known to governing man for shirking the duties of government.

I remember an excellent comedy of this sort in which I myself took part. The Admiralty had given an order for the making of an important part of a man-of-war to a small company (what is called a ‘one-man’ company) run for the profit of a friend of the Prime Minister of the day.

There was nothing excessive about that bit of favouritism. It was natural that a politician should help a friend: some one must have the order, and there was no great harm done to the State. But the next step was of real importance.

It turned out that the part supplied was defective. Those who supplied it might plead that they did not know the defect to exist, nor indeed would it be to their advantage to have allowed such a defect. It was probably an accident, though it did point to the work having been given to people inadequate to its gravity. The part was sent back to be put right. Instead of being put right, as it should have been, an operation was performed with the effect of concealing the defect, instead of remedying it. The part was sent back in such a condition that, had the flaw not been discovered, the great man-of-war itself and its crew might have perished. This was obviously a very serious matter indeed. If there is one thing the politicians must not be allowed to play tricks with, it is the Navy.

Now, the Parliamentarians appointed to look into public accounts issued a fine bombastic denunciation of the awful business, and used such words as would have satisfied Jeremiah. _But they were very careful not to mention a single name._

That seemed to me something of a defect. I was in Parliament at the time, and I set out to find out who were the actual human beings responsible for this crime. Unless one got on to them and punished them, one might as well have done nothing in the matter. If things of this sort can be done with impunity, they will certainly be done again.

I found the greatest difficulty in getting any single one of those six hundred-odd men in the Commons to act with me in the matter. I did not, of course, approach more than a few, because there were not more than a few who would even consider the public good; but by one of those few I was told that it was not usual to act in this fashion; that such action was regarded as ‘personal’; that the thing was now some months concluded and ought to be buried; that it was difficult to arrive at the ultimate responsibility in these affairs—and so on. They all applied to a principal unit of the British Navy, to an English man-of-war and a thousand English lives, the principle that the politician was more important than ship or crew, and that their own Parliamentary skins were more important than the country.