Chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who happened to be poor, they had not really the courage of their own convictions. They would expatiate upon methods; they could not define their aims; they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as progress or efficiency or success. They were not prepared to say what they wanted to succeed in producing, towards what goal they were progressing or what was the test of efficiency. And part of this inability arose from their curious fear of the past. Most movements of reform have looked to the past for great part of their inspiration. To reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return. On this point, G.K. attacked two popular sayings. One was "You can't put the clock back"; but, he said, you can and you do constantly. The clock is a piece of mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "There is another proverb: 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God, I will make it again."

It is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out of tune with the Socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of his forefathers. It is less easy to understand why it was unacceptable also to most of the Tories. One reviewer asked whether Mr. Chesterton was the hoariest of Conservatives or the wildest of Radicals. And with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as they are with this one. "The universe is ill-regulated," said the Liverpool Daily Post, "according to the fancy of Mr. Chesterton; but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over matters with him, he would soon come to see that a Chestertonian cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." On the other hand, the Toronto Globe remarks, "His boisterous optimism will not admit that there is anything to sorrow over in this best of all possible worlds." The Observer suggested that Chesterton would find no disciples because "his converts would never know from one week to another what they had been converted to"; while the Yorkshire Post felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that "a shrewd reader can pretty accurately anticipate Mr. Chesterton's point of view on any subject whatsoever."

It seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought, so abundantly illustrated, should not have been clear to all his readers. Some reviewers, one supposes, had not read the book; but surely the Daily Telegraph was deliberately refusing to face a challenge when it wrote: "His whole book is an absurdity, but to be absurd for three hundred pages on end is itself a work of genius." That particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue. He was the official Tory. But those whom I might call the unofficial Tories, such men for instance as my own father, received much of this book with delight and yet declined to take Chesterton's sociology seriously. And I think it is worth trying to see why this was the case.

In a letter to the Clarion, G.K. outlines his own position: "If you want praise or blame for Socialists I have enormous quantities of both. Roughly speaking (1) I praise them to infinity because they want to smash modern society. (2) I blame them to infinity because of what they want to put in its place. As the smashing must, I suppose, come first, my practical sympathies are mainly with them."*

[* Letter to the Clarion, February 8, 1910.]

Such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest old-fashioned Tory. And because it shocked him, he made the mistake of calling it irresponsible. Chesterton frequently urged revolution as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of things. But the word "revolution" suggested streets running with blood. And, on the other hand, they had not the very faintest conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which Chesterton proposed to revolt. I think it must be said too that he was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he proposed. He certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine! And even when urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of England, he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme similar to that which George Wyndham had introduced in Ireland. But besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed, there was another weakness in his presentment of his sociology which I think was his chief weakness as a writer.

It would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words, proverbs, popular sayings. He wrung every ounce of meaning out of them; he stood them on their heads; he turned them inside out. And everything he said he illustrated with an extraordinary wealth of fancy; but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts there is a curious change. In his sociology, he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies. He would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then, very often, it would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary reader was wrong. The "fact" had not been the foundation of his thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the "fact" had not been there at all, his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the distinction.

It is a little difficult to make the point clear; but anyone who has read the Browning and the Dickens and then read the reviews of them will recognise what I mean. It was universally acknowledged that Chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the heart of his subject in a way that the most painstaking biographer and critic could not emulate. The more deeply one reads Dickens or Browning, the more even one studies their lives, the more one is confirmed as to the profound truth of the Chesterton estimate and the genius of his insight. A superficial glance sees only the errors; a deeper gaze discovers the truth. It is exactly the same with his sociology. But here we are in a field where there is far more prejudice. When Chesterton talked of State interference and used again and again the same illustration—that of children whose hair was forcibly cut short in a Board School—two questions were asked by Socialists: Was this a solitary incident? Was it accurately reported? When a pained doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear their children should catch things from other and dirtier children, it appeared as though G.K. had built far too much on this one point. It was not the case. He was not building on the incident, he was illustrating by the incident. But it must be admitted that he was incredibly careless in investigating such incidents; and quite indifferent as to his own accuracy. And this was foolish, for he could have found in Police Court records, in the pages of John Bull and later of the Eye Witness itself, abundance of well verified illustrations of his thesis.

In the same way, when he talked of the robbery of the people of England by the great landlords, he did not take the slightest trouble to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter. It must be remembered that the sociological side of English history was only just beginning to be explored to any serious extent. In the Village Labourer, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond point out to what an extent they had had to depend on the Home Office papers and contemporary documents for the mass of facts which this book and the Town Labourer brought for the first time to the knowledge of the general public. Chesterton had worked with Hammond on the Speaker for some years. Just as with his book about Shaw so too with the background of his sociology he could have gone round the corner and got the required information. He knew the thing in general terms; he would not be bothered to make that knowledge convincing to his readers. If to his genius for expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of marshalling and presenting facts, he must surely have convinced all men of goodwill.

For in this matter the facts were there to marshal. It was less than a hundred years since the last struggle of the English yeomen against a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered the whole shape of our country. And it seems to have left no trace in the memory of the English poor. In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen describes Catherine Morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime. But Chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the very real one that the owner of Northanger Abbey was not an Abbot. The ordinary Englishman, however, thinks little of a crime that consisted in robbing "a lot of lazy monks." That they had possessed so much of the land of England merely seemed to make the act a more desirable one: yet it was a confiscation, not so much of monks' land as of the people's land administered by the monasteries.

What is even less realised is how much of the structure of the mediaeval village remained after the Reformation and how widespread was small ownership nearly to the end of the eighteenth century, when Enclosures began estimated by the Hammonds at five million acres. This land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and became the private property of the rich. This business of the Enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the same key position in Chesterton's sociological thinking as the Marconi Case (shortly to be discussed) had in his political.

In every village of England had been small freeholders, copyholders and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the village. These common lands were not mere stretches of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable, to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night. Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (to a new edition of which Chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and brewing. He puts a cottager's earnings, working part-time for a farmer, at about 10 sh. a week. This figure would vary, but the possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad times. A man with fire and food could be quasi-independent; and indeed some of the larger farmers, witnessing before Enclosure Enquiry Committees, complained of this very spirit of independence as producing idleness and "sauciness."

The case for the Enclosures was that improved agricultural methods could not be used in the open fields: more food was grown for increasing town populations: much waste land ploughed: livestock immeasurably improved. Only later was the cost counted when cheap imported food for these same towns had slain English agriculture. The "compensation" in small plots or sums of money could not for the smaller commoners replace what they had lost—even when they succeeded in getting it. Claims had to be made in writing—and few cottagers could write. How difficult too to reduce to its money value a claim for cutting turf or pasturing pigs and geese. A commissioner, who had administered twenty Enclosure Acts, lamented to Arthur Young that he had been the means of ruining two thousand poor people. But the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all that the commons had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich. Arthur Young had thought the benefits of common "perfectly contemptible," but by 1801 he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he had helped to start.

Before enclosure, the English cottager had had milk, butter and cheese in plenty, home-grown pork and bacon, home-brewed beer and home-baked bread, his own vegetables (although Cobbett scorned green rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only), his own eggs and poultry. After enclosure, he could get no milk, for the farmers would not sell it; no meat, for his wages could not buy it; and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by Cobbett. Working long hours he lived on bread, potatoes and tea, and insufficient even of these. Lord Winchelsea, one of the very few landowners who resisted the trend of the time, mentioned in the House of Lords the discovery of four labourers, starved to death under a hedge, and said this was a typical occurrence.

At the beginning of the Enclosure period the Industrial Revolution was barely in its infancy. A large part of the spinning, weaving and other manufactures was carried on in the cottages of men who had gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own. The invention of power machines, the discovery of coal wherewith those machines could be worked, led to the concentration of factories in the huge cities. But it was the drift from the villages of dispossessed men, together with the cheap child labour provided by Poor Law Guardians, that made possible the starvation wages and the tyranny of the factory system. And here the tyrants were largely of a different class. There were some landowners who also had factories, and more who possessed coal-mines, but many of the manufacturers had themselves come from the class of the dispossessed.

Successful manufacturers made money—a great deal of money. Many of the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in contrast with their rate of wages, and the contrast is startling. So, as the towns grew, the masters left the smoke they were creating and bought country places and became country gentlemen, preserved their own game and judged their own tenants. And thus disappeared yet another section of the ancient country folk. For the large landowners would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the land of small farmers and yeomen. This was the age of new country houses with a hundred rooms and vast offices that housed an army of servants. "Labour was cheap," the descendants of those who built just then will tell you, as they gaze disconsolate at their unwieldy heritage. Old and new families alike built or rebuilt, added and improved.

Cobbett rode rurally and angrily through the ruins of a better England (described a century earlier by another horseman, Daniel Defoe). Goldsmith mourned an early example in his "Deserted Village," but they are the only voices in an abundant literature. Jane Austen is, indeed, the perfect example of what Chesterton always realised—the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the wealthy had done their work of destruction. He did not account them as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events. And what he saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present: England was still possessed and still governed by a minority. The Conservatives were "a minority that was rich," the liberals "a minority that was mad." And those two minorities tended to join together and rob and oppress the ordinary man, in the name of some theory of progress and perfection.

Thus the Protestant Reformation had closed the monasteries, which were the poor man's inns, in the name of a purer religion; the economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories with a promise of future wealth and prosperity. These had been the experts of their day. Now the new experts were telling him with equal eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about for him the new Jerusalem. But never did the expert think of asking Jones, the ordinary man, what he himself wanted. Jones just wanted the "divinely ordinary things"—a house of his own and a family life. And that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called "The Homelessness of Jones."

In a debate in the Oxford Union, G.K. maintained that the House of Lords was a menace to the State, because it failed precisely in what was supposed to be its main function, that of conservation. It had not saved, it had destroyed the Church lands and the common lands; it was ready to pass any Bill that affected only the lower classes. "We are all Socialists now," Sir William Harcourt had lately said, and Chesterton saw that Socialism would mean merely further restriction of liberty and continued coercion of the poor by the experts and the rich. So, looking at the past, Chesterton desired a restoration which he often called a Revolution. There were two forms of government that might succeed—a real Monarchy, in which one ordinary man governed many ordinary men—or a real democracy, in which many ordinary men governed themselves. Aristocracy may have begun well in England when it was an army protecting England: when the Duke was a Dux. Now it was merely plutocracy and it had become "an army without an enemy billeted on the people."

All this and more formed the background of Chesterton's mind. But what he wrote was a comment on the scene, not a picture of it. He wrote of the terrible irony whereby "the Commons were enclosing the commons." He spoke of the English revolution of the eighteenth century, "a revolution of the rich against the poor." He mourned with Goldsmith the destruction of England's peasantry. He cried aloud like Cobbett, for he too had discovered the murder of England his mother. But his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death.



CHAPTER XVIII

The Eye Witness

THE PUBLICATION OF What's Wrong With the World brings us to 1910. Gilbert had, as we have seen, originally intended to call the book What's Wrong? laying some emphasis on the note of interrogation. It amused him to perplex the casual visitor by going off to his study with the muttered remark: "I must get on with What's Wrong." The change of name and the omission of the note of interrogation (both changes the act of his publishers) represented a certain loss, for indeed Gilbert was still asking himself what was wrong when he was writing this book, although he was very certain what was right—his ideals were really a clear picture of health. His doubts about the achievement of those ideals in the present world and with his present political allegiance were, as he suggests in the Autobiography, vague but becoming more definite.

Did this mean that he ever looked hopefully towards the other big division of the English political scene—the Tory or Conservative party to which his brother had once declared he belonged without knowing it? That would be a simpler story than what really happened in his mind—and I confess that I am myself sufficiently vague and doubtful about part of what the Chesterbelloc believed they were discovering, to find it a little difficult to describe it clearly. Cecil Chesterton and Belloc set down their views in a book called The Party System. Gilbert made his clear in letters to the Liberal Press.

The English party system had often enough been attacked for its obvious defects and indeed the New Witness's even livelier contemporary John Bull was shouting for its abolition. But Belloc and Cecil Chesterton had their own line. Their general thesis was that not only did the people of England not govern, Parliament did not govern either. The Cabinet governed and it was chosen by the real rulers of the party. For each party was run by an oligarchy, and run roughly on the same lines. Lists were given of families whose brothers-in-law and cousins (though not yet their sisters and their aunts) found place in the Ministry of one or other political party. Moreover, the governing families on both sides were in many cases connected by birth or marriage and all belonged to the same social set. But money too was useful: men could buy their way in. Each party had a fund, and those who could contribute largely had of necessity an influence on party policy. The existent Liberal Government had brought to a totally new peak the art of swelling its fund by the sale of titles: which in many instances meant the sale of hereditary governing powers, since those higher titles which carry with them a seat in the House of Lords were sold like the others, at a higher rate naturally. For the rank and file member, a political career no longer meant the chance for talents and courage to win recognition in an open field. A man who believed that his first duty was to represent his constituents stood no chance of advancement. Certainly a private member could not introduce a bill as his own and get it debated on its merits.

None of this was new, though the book did it rather exceptionally well. What was new was the theory that the two party oligarchies were secretly one, that the fights between the parties were little more than sham fights. The ordinary party member was unaware of this secret conspiracy between the leaders and would obey the call of the party Whip and accept a sort of military discipline with the genuine belief that the defeat of his party would mean disaster to his country.

Belloc had discovered for himself the impotence of the private member. He had, as we have seen, been elected to Parliament by South Salford in 1906 as a Liberal. In Parliament he proposed a measure for the publication of the names of subscribers to the Party Funds. Naturally enough the proposal got nowhere. Also naturally enough the Party Funds were not forthcoming to support him at the next election. He fought and won the seat as an Independent. At the second election of 1910 he declined to stand, having lucidly explained to the House of Commons in a final speech that a seat there was of no value under the existing system.

Thus Belloc's own experience, and a thousand other things, went to prove the stranglehold the rulers of the party had on the party. But did it prove, or did the book establish, the theory of a behind-scenes conspiracy between the small groups who controlled each of the great historical parties, which was the theme not only of The Party System but also of Belloc's brilliant political novels— notably Mr. Clutterbuck's Election and Pongo and the Bull?

Of the stranglehold there was no doubt and Gilbert soon found it too much for his own allegiance to the Liberal Party or any other. At the election of 1910, he addressed a Liberal meeting at Beaconsfield and dealt vigorously with constant Tory questions and interjections from the back of the hall. He obviously enjoyed the fight and a little later he spoke for the "League of Young Liberals" and was photographed standing at the back of their van. But although he went to London to vote for John Burns in Battersea and would probably have continued to vote Liberal or Labour, he showed at a Women's Suffrage meeting in 1911 a growing scepticism about the value of the vote. He was reported as saying, "If I voted for John Burns now, I should not be voting for anything at all (laughter)."

It must have been irritating that this interpolation "laughter" was liable to occur when Chesterton was most serious; he did not change quickly but in the alteration of his outlook towards his party, his growing doubt whether it stood for any real values, he was very serious. In the years that followed the coming into power of Liberalism there were a multitude of Acts described as of little importance and passed into law after little or no discussion. At the same time, private members complained that they could get no attention for really urgent matters of social reform. The Nation, as a party paper, defended the state of things and talked of official business and of want of time. Their attitude was vigorously attacked by Gilbert, whose first letter (Jan. 17, 1911) ended with this paragraph:

Who ever dreamed of getting "perfect freedom and fulness of discussion" except in heaven? The case urged against Cabinets is that we have no freedom and no discussion, except that laid down despotically by a few men on front benches. Your assurance that Parliament is very busy is utterly vain. It is busy on things the dictators direct. That small men and small questions get squeezed out among big ones, that is a normal disaster. With us, on the contrary, it is the big questions that get squeezed out. The Party was not allowed really to attack the South African War, for fear it should alienate Mr. Asquith. It was not allowed to object to Mr. Herbert Gladstone (or is it Lord Gladstone? This blaze of democracy blinds one) when he sought to abolish the Habeas Corpus Act, and leave the poorer sort of pickpockets permanently at the caprice of their jailers. Parliament is busy on the aristocratic fads; and mankind must mark time with a million stamping feet, while Mr. Herbert Samuel searches a gutter-boy for cigarettes. That is what you call the congestion of Parliament.

The Editor of the Nation was so rash as to append to this letter the words, "We must be stupid for we have no idea what Mr. Chesterton means." This was too good an opening to be lost. G.K. returned to the charge and I feel that this correspondence is so important in various ways that the next two letters should be given in full.

Sir,

In a note to my last week's letter you remark, "We must be stupid; but we have no idea what Mr. Chesterton means." As an old friend I can assure you that you are by no means stupid; some other explanation of this unnatural darkness must be found; and I find it in the effect of that official party phraseology which I attack, and which I am by no means alone in attacking. If I had talked about "true Imperialism," or "our loyalty to our gallant leader," you might have thought you knew what I meant; because I meant nothing. But I do mean something; and I do want you to understand what I mean. I will, therefore, state it with total dullness, in separate paragraphs; and I will number them.

(1) I say a democracy means a State where the citizens first desire something and then get it. That is surely simple.

(2) I say that where this is deflected by the disadvantage of representation, it means that the citizens desire a thing and tell the representatives to get it. I trust I make myself clear.

(3) The representatives, in order to get it at all, must have some control over detail; but the design must come from popular desire. Have we got that down?

(4) You, I understand, hold that English M. P.s today do thus obey the public in design, varying only in detail. That is a quite clear contention.

(5) I say they don't. Tell me if I am getting too abstruse.

(6) I say our representatives accept designs and desires almost entirely from the Cabinet class above them; and practically not at all from the constituents below them. I say the people does not wield a Parliament which wields a Cabinet. I say the Cabinet bullies a timid Parliament which bullies a bewildered people. Is that plain?

(7) If you ask why the people endure and play this game, I say they play it as they would play the official games of any despotism or aristocracy. The average Englishman puts his cross on a ballot-paper as he takes off his hat to the King—and would take it off if there were no ballot-papers. There is no democracy in the business. Is that definite?

(8) If you ask why we have thus lost democracy, I say from two causes; (a) The omnipotence of an unelected body, the Cabinet; (b) the party system, which turns all politics into a game like the Boat Race. Is that all right?

(9) If you want examples I could give you scores. I say the people did not cry out that all children whose parents lunch on cheese and beer in an inn should be left out in the rain. I say the people did not demand that a man's sentence should be settled by his jailers instead of by his judges. I say these things came from a rich group, not only without any evidence, but really without any pretence, that they were popular. I say the people hardly heard of them at the polls. But here I do not need to give examples, but merely to say what I mean. Surely I have said it now.

Yours,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

January 26th, 1911.

Editor's Note.

Mr. Chesterton is precise enough now, but he is precisely wrong. There are grains of truth in his premises, a bushel of exaggeration in his conclusions. We have not "lost democracy"; the two instances which he alleges, both of which we dislike, are too small to prove so large a case.

To this G. K. replied:

Sir,

I want to thank you for printing my letters, and especially for your last important comment, in which you say that the Crimes and Children's Acts were bad, but are "too small" to support a charge of undemocracy. And I want to ask you one last question, which is the question.

Why do you think of these things as small? They are really enormous. One alters the daily habits of millions of people; the other destroys the public law of thousands of years. What can be more fundamental than food, drink, and children? What can be more catastrophic than putting us back in the primal anarchy, in which a man was flung into a dungeon and left there "till he listened to reason?" There has been no such overturn in European ethics since Constantine proclaimed the cross.

Why do you think of these things as small? I will tell you. Unconsciously, no doubt, but simply and solely because the Front Benches did not announce them as big. They were not "first-class measures"; they were not "full-dress debates." The governing class got them through in the quick, quiet, secondary way in which they pass things that the people positively detests; not in the pompous, lengthy, oratorical way in which they present measures that the people merely bets on, as it might on a new horse. A "first-class measure" means, for instance, tinkering for months at some tottery compromise about a Religious Education that doesn't exist. The reason is simple. "Sound Church Teaching" and "Dogmatic Christianity" both happen to be hobbies in the class from which Cabinets come. But going to public-houses and going to prison are both habits with which that class is, unfortunately, quite unfamiliar. It is ready, therefore, at a stroke of the pen, to bring all folly into the taverns and all injustice into the jails.

Yours,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

February 2nd, 1911.

It was not only in the Nation that such letters as these appeared. "We can't write in every paper at once," runs a letter in the New Age. "We do our best." ("We" meant Gilbert, Cecil and Hilaire Belloc.) And G.K. goes on to answer four questions which have been put by a correspondent signing himself, "Political Journalist."

First, in whose eyes but ours has the Party System lost credit? I say in nearly everybody's. If this were a free country, I could mention offhand a score of men within a stone's throw; an innkeeper, a doctor, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a civil servant. As it is, I may put it this way. In a large debating society I proposed to attack the Party System, and for a long time I could not get an opposer. At last, I got one. He defended the Party System on the ground that people must be bamboozled more or less.

Second, he asks if the Party System does not govern the country to the content of most citizens. I answer that Englishmen are happy under the Party System solely and exactly as Romans were happy under Nero. That is, not because government was good, but because Life is good, even without good government. Nero's slaves enjoyed Italy, not Nero. Modern Englishmen enjoy England but certainly not the British Constitution. The legislation is detested, wherever it is even felt. The other day a Cambridge don complained that, when out bicycling with his boys, he had to leave them in the rain while he drank a glass of cider. Count the whole series of human souls between a costermonger and a Cambridge don, and you will see a nation in mutiny.

Third, "What substitute, etc., etc." Here again, the answer is simple and indeed traditional. I suggest we should do what was always suggested in the riddles and revolutions of the recent centuries. In the seventeenth century phrase, I suggest that we should "call a free Parliament!"

Fourth, "Is Democracy compatible with Parliamentary Government?" God forbid. Is God compatible with Church Government? Why should He be? It is the other things that have to be compatible with God. A church can only be a humble effort to utter God. A Parliament can only be a humble effort to express Man. But for all that, there is a deal of commonsense left in the world, and people do know when priests or politicians are honestly trying to express a mystery—and when they are only taking advantage of an ambiguity.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Encouraged by the excitement that had attended the publication of The Party System its authors decided to attempt a newspaper of their own. This paper is still in existence but it has in the course of its history appeared under four different titles. To avoid later confusion I had better set these down at the outset.

The Eye Witness, June 1911-October 1912 The New Witness, November 1912-May 1923 G. K.'s Weekly, 1925-1936 The Weekly Review, 1936 till today

During the first year of its existence the Eye Witness was edited by Belloc. Cecil Chesterton took over the editorship after a short interregnum during which he was assistant editor. Charles Granville had financed it. When he went bankrupt the title was altered to The New Witness. When Cecil joined the Army in 1916, G.K. became Editor. In 1923 the paper died, but two years later rose again under the title, G.K.'s Weekly. After Gilbert's own death Belloc took it back. Today, as The Weekly Review, it is edited by Reginald Jebb, Belloc's son-in-law. With all these changes of name, the continuity of the paper is unmistakable. Its main aim may be roughly defined under two headings. 1. To fight for the liberty of Englishmen against increasing enslavement to a Plutocracy. 2. To expose and combat corruption in public life.

The fight for Liberty appears in the letters quoted above in the form of an attack on certain bills: Belloc unified and defined it with real genius in the articles which became two of his most important books: The Servile State and The Restoration of Property. If these two books be set beside Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World and The Outline of Sanity the Chesterbelloc sociology stands complete.

In his Cobbett, G.K. was later to emphasise the genius with which Cobbett saw the England of today a hundred years before it was there to be seen. Belloc in the same way saw both what was coming and the way in which it was coming. Especially far-sighted was his attitude to Lloyd George's Compulsory Health Insurance Act. It was the first act of the kind in England and the scheme in outline was: every week every employed person must have a stamp stuck on a card by his employer, of which he paid slightly less and the employer slightly more than half the cost. The money thus saved gave the insured person free medical treatment and a certain weekly sum during the period of illness. Agricultural labourers were omitted from the act and a ferment raged on the question of domestic servants, who were eventually included in its operation. It was practically acknowledged that this was done to make the Act more workable financially. For domestic servants were an especially healthy class and, moreover, in most upper and middle-class households they were already attended by the family doctor without cost to themselves.

The company in which the Eye Witness found itself in opposing this Act was indeed a case of "strange bedfellows." For the opposition was led by the Conservatives (on the ground that the Act was Socialism). Many a mistress and many a maid did I hear in those days in good Conservative homes declaring they would rather go to prison than "lick Lloyd George's stamps." Most Liberals, on the other hand, regarded the Act as an example of enlightened legislation for the benefit of the poor. The Eye Witness saw in it the arrival of the Servile State. Their main objections cut deep. As with compulsory education, but in much more far-reaching fashion, this Act took away the liberty and the personal responsibilities of the poor—and in doing so put them into a category—forever ticketed and labelled, separated from the other part of the nation. As people for whom everything had to be done, they were increasingly at the mercy of their employers, of Government Inspectors, of philanthropic societies, increasingly slaves.

What was meant by the Servile State? It was, said Belloc, an "arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour." It was, quite simply, the return of slavery as the condition of the poor: and the Chesterbelloc did not think, then or ever, that any increase of comfort or security was a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.

In a section of the paper called "Lex versus the Poor" the editor made a point of collecting instances of oppression. A series of articles attacked the Mentally Deficient Bill whereby poor parents could have their children taken from them—those children who most needed them and whom they often loved and clung to above the others, and a Jewish contributor to the paper, Dr. Eder, pointed out in admirable letters how divided was the medical profession itself on what constituted mental deficiency and whether family life was not far more likely to develop the mind than segregation with other deficients in an Institution.

To the official harriers of the poor were added further inspectors sent by such societies as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Cruelty to children, as Gilbert often pointed out, is a horrible thing, but very seldom proved of parents against their own children. The word was stretched to cover anything that these inspectors called neglect. Lately we have read of a case, and many like it were reported in the New Witness, where failure to wash children adequately was called cruelty. And what was the remedy? To take away the father, the breadwinner, to prison. For insufficient food and clothes to substitute destitution, for insufficient care to remove the only one the children had to care for them at all: always to break up the family.

Worst of all was the question of school attendance: While a child of three was dying of starvation, the mother was at the Police Court where she was fined for not sending an older child to school. As she could not pay the fine her husband was sent to prison for a week. A child died of consumption. The parents said at the inquest they had not dared to keep her at home when she got sick, for fear of the school inspector.

As he had in What's Wrong With the World been fired by the thought of the landless poor of England, so now these stories stirred Gilbert deeply. He saw the philanthropists like the Pharisees, unheeding the wisdom learned by the Wise Men at Bethlehem: saw them with their busy pencils peering at the Mother's omissions while the vast crimes of the State went unchallenged. He wrote a poem called "The Neglected Child" and "dedicated in a glow of Christian Charity to a philanthropic Society."

The Teachers in the temple They did not lift their eyes For the blazing star on Bethlehem Or the Wise Men grown wise.

They heeded jot and tittle, They heeded not a jot The rending voice in Ramah And the children that were not.

Or how the panic of the poor Choked all the fields with flight, Or how the red sword of the rich Ran ravening through the night.

They made their notes; while naked And monstrous and obscene A tyrant bathed in all the blood Of men that might have been.

But they did chide Our Lady And tax her for this thing, That she had lost Him for a time And sought Him sorrowing.

To most of the Eye Witness group the fight for freedom was so bound up with the fight against corruption that all was but one fight. I think that when they looked back they were too much inclined to see the shadow of Lloyd George behind them as well as around them: that in fact the Liberal Party of those years had brought with it a new descent in political decency—a descent which would have startled both Gladstone and the more cynical Disraeli. Of this more when we come to Marconi. Meanwhile there was certainly a whole lot to fight about and the group responsible for the Witness, not content with the pen, formed a Society entitled "The League for Clean Government," with Mr. John Scurr as Secretary. This League specialised in promoting the candidature of independent Members of Parliament for such vacancies as occurred between general elections, and in attacking Party "place men." Doubtless other elements were present at some of these by-elections but the League boasted its success on several occasions, notably in the three defeats sustained by C. F. G. Masterman.

Charles Masterman had been with Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton a member of the group of young Christian Socialists that drew its inspiration in great part from Canon Scott Holland. He had gone further than most of them in his practical sympathy and understanding for the destitute. With a friend he had taken a workman's flat in the slums and he had written a somewhat florid but very moving book recording conditions experienced as well as observed. He was one of the Young Liberals who entered Parliament full of ardour to fight the battles of the poor. The sequel as they saw it may best be told by Belloc and Cecil Chesterton themselves. In The Party System they wrote:

. . . Mr. Masterman entered Parliament as a Liberal of independent views. During his first two years in the House he distinguished himself as a critic of the Liberal Ministry. He criticised their Education Bill. He criticised with especial force the policy of Mr. John Burns at the Local Government Board. His conduct attracted the notice of the leaders of the party. He was offered office, accepted it, and since then has been silent, except for an occasional rhetorical exercise in defence of the Government. One fact will be sufficient to emphasise the change. On March 13th, 1908, Mr. Masterman voted for the Right to Work Bill of the Labour Party. In May of the same year he accepted a place with a salary of L1200 a year—it has since risen to L1500. On April 20th, 1909, he voted, at the bidding of the Party Whips, against the same Bill which he had voted for in the previous year. Yet this remarkable example of the "peril of change"* does not apparently create any indignation or even astonishment in the political world which Mr. Masterman adorns. On the contrary, he seems to be generally regarded as a politician of exceptionally high ideals. No better instance need be recorded of the peculiar atmosphere it is the business of these pages to describe.

[* The title of one of Masterman's books was In Peril of Change.]

At the succeeding General Election, Masterman was not re-elected. And he failed again in a couple of by-elections. In all these elections, the League for Clean Government campaigned fiercely against him. There was certainly in the feeling of Belloc and Cecil Chesterton towards Masterman a great deal of the bitterness that moved Browning to write, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," and I do not think there is anything in the history of the paper that created so strong a feeling against it in certain minds. There seemed something peculiarly ungenerous in the continued attacks after a series of defeats, in the insistence with which Masterman's name was dragged in, always accompanied by sneers. Replying to a remonstrance to this effect, Cecil Chesterton, then Editor of the New Witness, stated that in his considered opinion it was a duty to make a successful career impossible to any man convicted of selling his principles for success.

I dwell on this matter of Masterman for two reasons. The first is that it was one of the rare occasions on which Gilbert Chesterton disagreed with his brother and Belloc. Gilbert was a very faithful friend: it would be hard to find a broken friendship in his life. He had moreover much of the power that aroused his enthusiasm in Browning of going into the depths of a character and discovering the virtue concealed there. And as with Browning his explanation took account of elements that really existed but could find no place in a more narrowly adverse view.

"Many of my own best friends," he wrote of Masterman, "entirely misunderstood and underrated him. It is true that as he rose higher in politics, the veil of the politician began to descend a little on him also; but he became a politician from the noblest bitterness on behalf of the poor; and what was blamed in him was the fault of much more ignoble men. . . . But he was also an organiser and liked governing; only his pessimism made him think that government had always been bad, and was now no worse than usual. Therefore, to men on fire for reform, he came to seem an obstacle and an official apologist." After G.K. became Editor of the New Witness the attacks on Masterman ceased, but he did not differ from the two earlier Editors in his views on the ethics of political action or the principles of social reform.

The second reason for which the Masterman matter must be dwelt on is because it affords the best illustration of one curious fact in connection with the Eye and New Witness campaign. When the Life of Masterman recently appeared I seized it eagerly that I might read an authoritative defence of his position. I searched the Index under Eye Witness, New Witness, Cecil Chesterton and League for Clean Government. No one of them was mentioned. At last I discovered under Belloc and Scurr a faint allusion to their activities at a by-election in which Belloc was coupled with the Protestant Alliance leader Kensit as part of a contemptible opposition, and the unnamed League for Clean Government described as "those working with Mr. Scurr"! Clearly where it is possible to use against something powerful the weapon of ignoring it as though it were something obscure, that weapon is itself a powerful one. Against the New Witness it was used perpetually.

A paper which included among its contributors Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, J. S. Phillimore, E. C. Bentley, Wells, Shaw, Katharine Tynan, Desmond McCarthy, F. Y. Eccles, G. S. Street—to name only those who come first to mind—obviously stood high. Cecil Chesterton's own editorials, Hugh O'Donnell's picturesque series Twenty Years After, the high level of the reviewing and (oddly enough, considering the paper's outlook) the financial articles of Raymond Radclyffe, were all outstanding. The sales (at sixpence) were never enormous but the readers were on a high cultural level. The correspondence pages are always interesting.

The Eye Witness group, besides courage, had high spirits and they had wit. "Capulet's" rhymes; the series of ballades written by Baring, Bentley, Phillimore, Belloc and G.K.C.; "Mrs. Markham's History" written by Belloc; there was little of this quality in the other weeklies. Side by side with the serious attacks was a line of satire and of sheer fooling. The silver deal in India was being attacked in the editorials, while Mrs. Markham explained to Tommy how good, kind Lord Swaythling, really a Samuel, had lent money to his brother Mr. Montague (another Samuel) for the benefit of the poor people of India. The next week Tommy and Rachel grew enthusiastic about the kindness of Lord Swaythling in borrowing money that the Indian Government could not use. Mrs. Markham too made Rachel take a pencil and write out a list of Samuels including the Postmaster-General, now so busy over the Marconi Case. The next lesson was about titles. Then came one about policemen, and finally about company promoters and investments. How a promoter guesses there is oil somewhere, how money is lent to dig for it ("But, Mamma! How can money dig?"), how the Company promoter may find no oil, how if they think he has cheated them the rich men who lent their money can have him tried by twelve good men and true—(Tommy: "How do they know the men are good and true, Mamma?" Mrs. M.: "They do this by taking them in alphabetical order out of a list.").

Perhaps the combination of irony thinly veiling intensity of purpose, with humour sometimes degenerating into wild fooling, damned them in the eyes of many. But there was a more serious obstacle to the real effectiveness they might otherwise have had. When it was unavoidable to name the New Witness its opponents referred to it as though to a "rag." Why was this possible? Principally I think because of the violence of its language. Most Parliamentary matters to which it made reference were spoken of as instances of "foul" corruption or "dirty" business. Transactions by Ministers were said to "stink," while the Ministers themselves were described as carrying off or distributing "swag" and "boodle." In Vol. II of the Eye Witness, for instance, we find the "game of boodle," "dirty trick," "Keep your eye on the Railway Bill: you are going to be fleeced," and "stunt" and "ramp" passim. Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Rufus Isaacs are always called "George" and "Isaacs." The General of the Salvation Army is invariably "Old Booth," while in the headlines the word "Scandal" constantly recurs. Even admirers were at times like Fox's followers who

Groaned "What a passion he was in tonight! Men in a passion must be in the wrong And heavens how dangerous when they're built so strong." Thus the great Whig amid immense applause Scared off his clients and bawled down his cause, Undid reform by lauding Revolution Till cobblers cried "God save the Constitution."



CHAPTER XIX

Marconi

IN HIS Autobiography Gilbert Chesterton has set down his belief that the Marconi Scandal will be seen by historians as a landmark in English history. To him personally the revelations produced by it were a great shock and gave the death-blow to all that still lingered of his belief in the Liberal Party. For the rest of his life it may almost be called an obsession with him. In his eyes it was so great a landmark that as others spoke of events as pre- or post-war, he divided the political history of England into pre- and post-Marconi. It meant as much for his political outlook as the Enclosures for his social. It is necessary to know what happened in the Marconi Case if we are to understand a most important element in Chesterton's mental history.

The difficulty is to know what did happen. The main lines of a very complicated bit of history have never, so far as I know, been disentangled by anyone whose only interest was to disentangle them: and the partisans have naturally tangled them more. I wrote a draft chapter after reading the two thousand page report of the Parliamentary Committee, the six hundred page report of Cecil Chesterton's Trial, and masses of contemporary journalism. Then, in the circumstances I have related in the Introduction, I called in my husband's aid. The rest of this chapter is mainly his.

I. WHAT THE MINISTERS DID

The Imperial Conference of 1911 had approved the plan of a chain of state-owned wireless stations to be erected throughout the British Empire. The Post Office—Mr. Herbert Samuel being the Postmaster-General—was instructed to put the matter in hand. After consideration of competing systems, the Marconi was chosen. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of London—of which Mr. Godfrey Isaacs was Managing Director—was asked to tender for the work. Its tender was accepted on March 7, 1912. The main terms of the tender were as follows:

The Company was to erect stations in various parts of the Empire at a cost to the Government of L60,000 per station; these were then to be operated by the Governments of the United Kingdom and the Dominions and Colonies concerned; and the Marconi Company was to receive 10% of the gross receipts. The Agreement was for 28 years, though the Postmaster-General might terminate it at the end of eighteen years. But there was one further clause (Clause 10) allowing for termination at any time if the Government should find it advantageous to use a different system.

The acceptance of this tender was only the first stage. A contract had to be drawn up, and nothing would be finalised till this contract had been accepted by Parliament. In fact the contract was not completed till July 19. On that day it was placed on the table of the House of Commons.

For the understanding of the Marconi Case, the vital period is the four months of 1912 between March 7, when the tender was accepted, and July 19 when the contract was tabled. Let us concentrate upon that four-month period. The Postmaster-General issued no statement whatever on the matter but on March 8 the Company sent out a circular to its shareholders telling them the good news—but making the news look even better than it was by omitting all reference to Clause 10, which entitled the Government to substitute some rival system at any time it pleased. The Postmaster-General issued no correction because, as he said later, he had not been aware of the omission.

Immediately after, Godfrey Isaacs left for America to consider the affairs of the American Marconi Company, capitalised at $1,600,000, of which he was a Director. More than half its shares were owned by the English Company. On behalf of the English Company he bought up the rights of the American Company's principal rival, and then sold these rights (at a profit not stated but apparently very considerable) to the American Company for $1,400,000. To handle all this and allow for vast developments hoped for from this purchase and from a very favourable agreement Godfrey Isaacs had negotiated with Western Union, the American Company was to be re-organized as a $10,000,000 Company—two million shares at $5 each. The American Company—whose own repute in America was too low for any hope of raising money on that scale from the American public—seems to have agreed to the Godfrey Isaacs plan only on condition that the English Company should guarantee the subscription; and Godfrey Isaacs made himself personally responsible for placing 500,000 shares. (It should be remembered that the pound was then worth just under five dollars: a $5 share was worth L1.1.3, or L1 1/16 in English money.)

Godfrey Isaacs returned to England. On April 9 he lunched with his brothers Harry and Rufus—Rufus being Attorney-General in the British Government. He told them of the arrangements he had made—arrangements which were not yet made known to the public—and of the new stock about to be issued, and offered them 100,000 shares, out of the 500,000 for which he had made himself responsible, at the face value of L1.1.3. Rufus refused—one reason for his refusal being that the shares were not a good "buy," as the prospects of the Company did not warrant so large a new issue of capital. Harry took 50,000.

We now come to the transactions which the public was later to lump together rather crudely as "Ministers Gambling in Marconis."

A. On April 17—roughly a week after the luncheon—Rufus Isaacs bought 10,000 of Harry's shares at L2. He made the point later that buying from Godfrey would have been improper as Godfrey was director of a company with which the Government was negotiating, but that it was all right to buy from Harry who had bought from Godfrey. (Harry having paid only L1.1.3 was willing to let Rufus have them for the same price. But Rufus thought it only fair to pay the higher price. This is all the more remarkable because only a week earlier he had thought these same shares bad value at roughly half the price he was now prepared to pay.) Of his 10,000 shares, Rufus immediately sold 1000 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and 1000 to the Master of Elibank, who was chief Whip of the Liberal Party then in office. It is to be noted that no money passed at this time in any of those transactions: Rufus did not pay Harry, Lloyd George and Elibank did not pay Rufus.

Nor did the shares pass. Indeed the shares did not as yet exist, as it was not till the next day, April 18, that the American Marconi Company authorised the issue of the new capital. On the day after that, April 19, the shares were put on the market at L3.5.0. That same day they rose to L4. In the course of the day Rufus Isaacs sold 700 shares at an average price of L3.6.6, which on the face of it looks like clearing L3000 more than he had paid for all his shares and still having 3000 shares left. But he explained later that there had been pooling arrangements between himself and his brother, and himself and his two friends: so that the upshot of his day's transactions was that he had sold 2856 of his own shares, and 357 each for Lloyd George and Elibank.* The triumvirate therefore still had 6430 shares of which 1286 belonged to Lloyd George and Elibank.

[* Rufus' explanation boils down to this: he and Harry had arranged that whatever either sold in the course of the day should be totalled and divided in the proportion of their holdings. Rufus sold 7000 shares, Harry 10,850: a total of 17,850. Rufus had taken 1/5 of Harry's 50,000 shares, so one-fifth of the shares sold were allotted as his—i.e. 3570. Lloyd George and Elibank had each taken 1/10 of Rufus', therefore each was considered to have sold 357.]

On April 20 these two sold a further 1000 of their 1286 shares at L3.5/32.

B. On May 22 Lloyd George and Elibank bought 3000 more shares at L2.5/32. As they were not due to deliver the shares previously sold by them at L3.6.6 and L3.5/32 till June 20, this new purchase had something of the look of a "bear" transaction.

C. In April and May the Master of Elibank bought 3000 shares for the account of the Liberal Party, of whose funds he had charge.

These three transactions are all that the three politicians ever admitted, and nothing more was ever proved against them. As we have seen there was no documentary evidence of the principal transaction (the one I have called A), except that Rufus sold 7000 shares on April 19. In his acquiring of the shares, no broker was employed. Rufus did not pay Harry for the shares until January 6, 1913, some nine months later, when the enquiry was already on. There was no evidence other than his own word that 10,000 was the number he had agreed to take or L2 the price that he had agreed to pay, or that he had bought from Harry and not from Godfrey, or that of the 7000 shares he had certainly sold at a huge profit on April 19 half were sold for Harry. There was, indeed, no evidence that the shares were not a gift.

Even on what they admitted, they had obviously acted improperly. The contract with the English Marconi Company was not yet completed, Parliament had not been informed of its terms, Parliament therefore had yet to decide whether it would accept or reject it. Three members of Parliament had committed two grave improprieties:

(1) They had purchased shares—directly or at one remove—from the Managing Director of a Company seeking a contract from Parliament, in circumstances that were practically equivalent to receiving a gift of money from him. They received shares which the general public could not have bought till two days later and then only at over 50% more than the politicians paid.* (On this count, the fact that the shares were American Marconis made no difference: the point is that they were valuable shares sold to ministers at a special low price. This need not have been bribery, but it is a fact that one way of bribing a man is to buy something from him at more than it is worth, or sell something to him at less than it is worth.)

[* H. T. Campbell of Bullett, Campbell & Grenfell, the English Marconi Company's official brokers, gave evidence before the Parliamentary Committee that it would have been impossible for the general public to buy the shares before April 19. And as we have seen, they opened on that day at L3.5.0.]

(2) They—and through the Chief Whip's action the whole Liberal Party, though it did not know it—were financially interested in the acceptance by Parliament of the contract. For though they had not bought shares in the English Company (with which the contract was being made) but with the American Company (which had no direct interest in the contract), none the less it would have lowered the value of the American shares if the British Parliament had rejected the Marconi System and chosen some other in preference. I may say at once that I feel no certainty that the transaction was a sinister effort to bribe ministers. But had it been, exactly the right ministers were chosen. They were the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has charge of the nation's purse; the Attorney-General, who advises upon the legality of actions proposed; the Chief Whip, who takes the Party forces into the voting lobby. It was this same Chief Whip, the Master of Elibank, that had carried the sale of honours to a new height in his devotion to the increase of his Party's funds.

II. THE PARLIAMENTARY ENQUIRY

On July 19, 1912, the contract was put on the table of the House of Commons. In the ordinary course it would have come up for a vote some time before the end of the Parliamentary Session. But criticism of the contract was growing on the ground that it was too favourable to the Marconi Company. And rumours were flying that members of the Government had been gambling in Marconi shares (which, as we have seen, they had, though not in English Marconis).

Even before the tabling of the contract, members of Parliament, notably Major Archer-Shee, a Conservative, had been harrying Mr. Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster-General. On July 20, and in weekly articles following, it was attacked as a thoroughly bad contract by a writer in the Outlook, Mr. W. R. Lawson. On August 1, a Labour Member asked a question in the House about the rising price of Marconis. The feeling that enquiry was needed was so strong that on August 6, the last day but one of the session, the Prime Minister (who knew something of his colleagues' purchase of Marconis but never mentioned it) promised the House that the Marconi Agreement would not be rushed through without full discussion. In spite of this Herbert Samuel* and Elibank both tried hard to get the contract approved that day or the next. When it was quite clear that Parliament would not allow this, Herbert Samuel insisted on making a general statement on the contract. He too knew of the Ministers' dealings in American Marconis, but did not mention them. There was no debate or division. The question of ratification or rejection was postponed till the House should meet again in October.

[* The argument he put to Major Archer-Shee, M.P. was that the stations were urgently needed for Imperial defence.]

On August 8, Cecil Chesterton's paper the New Witness launched its first attack on the whole deal (though without reference to Ministerial gambling in Marconis) under the headline "The Marconi Scandal":

Isaacs' brother is Chairman of the Marconi Company. It has therefore been secretly arranged between Isaacs and Samuel that the British people shall give the Marconi Company a very large sum of money through the agency of the said Samuel, and for the benefit of the said Isaacs. Incidentally, the monopoly that is about to be granted to Isaacs No. 2, through the ardent charity of Isaacs No. 1 and his colleague the Postmaster-General, is a monopoly involving antiquated methods, the refusal of competing tenders far cheaper and far more efficient, and the saddling of this country with corruptly purchased goods, which happen to be inferior goods.

The article went on to say that these "swindles" were apt to occur in any country, but that England alone lacked the will to punish them: "it is the lack of even a minimum standard of honour urging even honest men to protest against such villainy that has brought us where we are."

In September L. J. Maxse's National Review had a criticism of the contract by Major Archer-Shee, M.P., with editorial comment as well. In the same month the Morning Post and the Spectator pressed for further enquiry. The October number of the National Review contained a searching criticism of the whole business and called special attention to the Stock Exchange gamble in American Marconis.

A few days later—on October 11—the re-assembled House of Commons held the promised debate. In the light of what we know, it is fascinating to read how nobody told a lie exactly and the truth was concealed all the same. Here is Sir Rufus Isaacs. He begins by formulating the rumours against Mr. Herbert Samuel and Mr. Lloyd George and himself. But he is careful to formulate them in such a way that he can truthfully deny them. The rumours, he says, were that the Ministers had dealt in the shares of a Company with which the Government was negotiating a contract: "Never from the beginning . . . have I had one single transaction with the shares of that Company."

Literally true, as you see. The contract was with the English Company, the shares he had bought were in the American Company. He made no allusion to that purchase.

Mr. Herbert Samuel—who is not accused of having purchased shares himself but who knew of what his colleagues had done—treads the same careful line: "I say that these stories that members of the Cabinet, knowing the contract was in contemplation, and feeling that possibly the price of shares might rise, themselves, directly or indirectly bought any of those shares, or took any interest in this Company through any other party whatever, have not one syllable of truth in them. Neither I myself nor any of my colleagues have at any time held one shilling's worth of shares in this Company, directly or indirectly, or have derived one penny profit from the fluctuations in their prices." However, he promised a Parliamentary Committee to enquire into the whole affair.

Isaacs had denied any transactions with "that Company," Samuel with "this Company." Neither had ventured to say "the English Company"—for that would instantly have raised the question of the American Company. It is an odd truth that has to be phrased so delicately. Lloyd George, the first of the ministers to speak, managed better. He flew into a rage with an interjector: "The hon. member said something about the Government, and he has talked about 'rumours.' I want to know what these rumours are. If the hon. gentleman has any charge to make against the Government as a whole, or against individual members of it, I think it ought to be stated openly. The reason why the Government wanted a frank discussion before going to Committee* was because we wanted to bring here these rumours, these sinister rumours, that have been passing from one foul lip to another behind the backs of the House." He sat down, still in a white heat, without having denied anything.

[* Italics mine.]

The Master of Elibank did not deny anything either. He was not there. He was, indeed, no longer in the House of Commons. He had inherited the title of Lord Murray of Elibank. He had left England in August and did not return till the enquiry was over: nor did he send any communication of any sort.

As we have seen, no literal lie was told. But Parliament and the country assumed that the Ministers had denied any gambling in Marconis of any sort. And the Ministers must have known that this was what their denials had been taken to mean.*

[* Rufus Isaacs' son mentions a theory held by some (though he thinks there are strong arguments against it) that Rufus' silence was due to instructions from the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, who was not anxious to have the connection of Lloyd George with the matter disclosed, "fearing that his personal unpopularity would lead to such an exacerbation of the attacks that the prestige of the whole Government might be seriously impaired." (Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading, pp. 248-9.)]

On October 29 the names were announced of the members appointed to the promised Committee of Enquiry. As usual they represented the various parties in proportion to their numbers in the House. The Liberals were in office, supported by Irish Nationalists and Labour Members: 9 members of the Committee (including the Chairman) were from these parties; 6 were Conservatives. One might have expected that the careful evasions in the House would have meant only a brief respite for the Ministers who had been so economical of the truth. They would appear before the Committee and then the whole thing would emerge. But though the Committee was appointed at the end of October and met three times most weeks thereafter, five months went by and no Minister was called. The plain fact is that Mr. Samuel's department, the Post Office, slanted the enquiry in a different direction right at the start by putting in evidence a confidential Blue Book and suggesting that Sir Alexander King, secretary to the Post Office, be heard first.

On the question of the goodness or badness of the contract itself, the Committee uncovered much that was interesting. It emerged that the Poulsen System had offered to erect stations at a cost of about L36,000 less per station than the Marconi, and that the Admiralty itself had estimated a cost, if they were undertaking the work, about the same as the Poulsen offer. But, by a confusion as to whether their figure did or did not include freight charges, the Admiralty estimate had been put down at L10,000 higher than it was! Nor was this the only confusion. When Sir Alexander King spoke of "concessions" made to the Government by the Marconi Company, he admitted under cross-questioning that there was no written record of these concessions. He spoke of various vitally important conversations and was not able to produce a Minute. Letters referred to were found to have been lost from the Post Office files.

Further, it appeared that while most rigid tests were to be required of the other systems, the Marconi people had been constantly taken almost on their own word alone. "Mr. Isaacs and Mr. Marconi both told us," said Sir Alexander King at one point, when asked whether he had had technical advice on a point of working.

"You will excuse me," said Mr. Harold Smith, "if for the moment I ignore the opinion of Mr. Marconi and Mr. Isaacs. I ask you who was the expert who gave you this information."

Then too as to the terms. The Government had proposed 3% on the gross takings. Godfrey Isaacs had held out for 10%, and got it. Moreover, the royalty was to be paid as long as a single Marconi patent was in use at the stations. Considering that by the Patents Act the Government had the legal right to take over any invention while paying reasonable compensation, the provision which gave so high a royalty to the Marconi Company was severely criticised. Again the right was given to the Marconi Company to advise on any fresh invention that should be offered to the Post Office—which meant that any invention made by their rivals was entirely at their mercy.

Naturally enough the question was pressed home whether the Post Office had really sought the advice of its own technical experts. It transpired that a technical sub-committee had been called once, and had recommended a further investigation of the Poulsen System. The report of this sub-committee had been shelved, and the members never summoned for a second meeting.

Early in January 1913, the Parliamentary Committee (against the advice of Herbert Samuel) asked for a special sub-committee of experts to go into the merits of the various wireless systems and report within three months at latest. It is not surprising that the New Witness commented on this as "a surrender of the most decided type, for it proposes to do what Samuel himself clearly ought to have done before he entered into the contract."

The report of this technical sub-committee showed that there had been a good deal of exaggeration in the first attack by the New Witness on the worth of the Marconi System. If one single system was to be used, it was the only one capable of carrying out the Government's requirements. But the sub-committee held that as wireless was in a state of rapid development, it would be better not to be tied to any one system. And they added that while the nature of the contract itself was not within their terms of reference, they must not be held to approve it.

From its examination of the contract, the Committee passed on to examine journalists and others as to the rumours against Ministers. And still the Ministers were not called.

On February 12, 1913, L. J. Maxse, Editor of The National Review, was being examined by the Committee. Suddenly he put his finger on the precise spot. Having expressed surprise at the non-appearance of Ministers, he went on: "One might have conceived that they would have appeared at its first sitting clamoring to state in the most categorical and emphatic manner that neither directly nor indirectly, in their own names or in other people's names, have they had any transactions whatsoever, either in London, Dublin, New York, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, or any other financial centre, in any shares in any Marconi Company throughout the negotiations with the Government. . . ."

"Any shares in any Marconi Company": the direct question was at last put.

On February 14, just two days later, something very curious happened. Le Matin, a Paris Daily paper, published a story to the effect that Mr. Maxse had charged that Samuel, Rufus Isaacs and Godfrey Isaacs had bought shares in the English Marconi Company at 50 francs (about L2 in those days) before the negotiations with the Government were started and had resold them at 200 francs (about L8) when the public learnt that the contract was going through. It was an extraordinary piece of clumsiness for any paper to have printed such a story: certainly Mr. Maxse had made no such charge. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck, if the Ministers wanted to tell their story in Court, that they should have this kind of clumsy libel to deny. And it is at least a coincidence that Rufus Isaacs happened, as his son tells us, to be in Paris when Le Matin printed the story. Samuel and Rufus Isaacs announced that they would prosecute and that Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith were their counsel. This decision to prosecute a not very important French newspaper, while taking no such step against papers in their own country, caused Gilbert Chesterton to write a "song of Cosmopolitan Courage":*

[* New Witness, Vol. I, p. 655.]

I am so swift to seize affronts, My spirit is so high, Whoever has insulted me Some foreigner must die.

I brought a libel action, For the Times had called me "thief," Against a paper in Bordeaux, A paper called Le Juif.

The Nation called me "cannibal" I could not let it pass— I got a retractation From a journal in Alsace.

And when The Morning Post raked up Some murders I'd devised, A Polish organ of finance At once apologised.

I know the charges varied much; At times, I am afraid The Frankfurt Frank withdrew a charge The Outlook had not made.

And what the true injustice Of the Standard's words had been, Was not correctly altered In the Young Turk's Magazine.

I know it sounds confusing— But as Mr. Lammle said, The anger of a gentleman Is boiling in my head.

The hearing of the case against Le Matin came on March 19. As that paper had withdrawn and apologised only three days after printing the story, there was no actual necessity for statements by Rufus Isaacs and Samuel. But they had decided to answer Maxse's question, to admit the dealings in American Marconis which they had not mentioned to the House of Commons: or rather to get their lawyer to tell the story and then answer his questions on the matter in a Court case where there could be no cross-examination because the Defendants were not contesting the case. Sir Edward Carson mentioned the American purchase at the end of a long speech and almost as an afterthought— "really the matter is so removed from the charges made in the libel that I only go into it at all . . . because of the position of the Attorney-General and because he wishes in the fullest way to state this deal, so that it may not be said that he keeps anything whatsoever back." As The Times remarked (9 June, 1913): "The fact was stated casually, as though it had been a matter at once trifling and irrelevant. Only persons of the most scrupulous honour, who desired that nothing whatsoever should remain hid would, it was suggested, have thought necessary to mention it at all."

The statement was not really as full as Carson's phrasing would seem to suggest. The court was told that Rufus Isaacs had bought 10,000 shares—but not from whom he had bought them: that he had paid market price, but not what the price was, nor that the shares were not on the market: that he had sold 1000 shares each to Lloyd George and Elibank, and had sold some on their behalf, but not that these two had had further buyings and sellings on their own. It was stated for Sir Rufus and reiterated by him that he had lost money on the deal—the reason being that while he had gained on the shares sold, the shares he still held had slumped. (It is difficult to see why Rufus Isaacs and later Lloyd George made such a point of the loss on their Marconi transactions. They can hardly have bought the shares in order to lose money on them, and their initial sellings showed a very large profit. Indeed Rufus Isaacs' loss depended on his having paid his brother L2 for the shares, and again upon the 7000 shares he sold on the opening day being only partly on his own behalf, and there is only his own word for these two statements. If Rufus lost, he lost to his brother, who had been willing to sell at cost price, with whom he had a pooling arrangement, and who made an enormous profit. If Rufus lost, the loss remained in the family.)

A week after the hearing of the Matin case, Rufus Isaacs appeared for the first time before the Parliamentary Committee, almost five months after its formation. His problem was not so much to explain his dealings in American Marconis, as to account for his silence in the House of Commons. His one desire that day in Parliament, it seems, had been to answer the "foul lies" being uttered against him, which he was "quite unable to find any foundation for, quite unable to trace the source of, quite unable to understand how they were started": obviously his dealings in American Marconis could have no possible bearing on these rumours, so he did not mention them: "I confined my speech entirely . . . to dealing with the four specific charges which I formulated."*

[* Italics mine.]

The Chairman, Sir Albert Spicer, suggested that one way to scotch the rumours would have been to mention his investment in American Marconis, "because both being Marconis you could easily understand one might get confused with the other." This question always drove Rufus Isaacs into a rage and indeed he met all difficult questions with rages which to this day, across the gulf of thirty years, seem simulated, and not convincingly.

Why had he not earlier asked the Committee to hear the story of the American shares? "I took the view . . . that I had no right to claim any preferential position . . . and it seemed to me that it might almost savour of presumption if I had asked the Committee to take my evidence or any Minister's evidence, out of the ordinary turn in which the Committee desired it." All the same he had once written a letter to the Committee asking to be heard but "on consideration did not send it."

During his examination the element of strain between the two parties on the Committee, which had been evident throughout the enquiry, was very much intensified—Lord Robert Cecil and the Conservatives courteously but tenaciously trying to get at the truth, the Ministerialists determined to shield their man. There is a most unpleasing contrast between the earlier bullying of the journalists (who after all were not on trial) and the deference the majority now showed to Ministers (who were).

Rufus Isaacs twisted and turned incredibly. But he did admit to Lord Robert Cecil that he had obtained the shares before they were available to the general public and at a price lower than that at which they were afterwards introduced to them. He tried later to modify this admission by saying that he had been told of dealings by others before April 17, but he could give no details: and the evidence of the Marconi Company's broker (quoted above) is decisive.

Two points of special interest emerged from his evidence. The first was that he had not told the whole story in the Matin case. He now mentioned that Lloyd George and Elibank had sold a further 1000 of the shares he held for them on the second day, July 20; and went on to tell of the purchase of 3000 shares by the same pair, the so-called "bear" transaction of May 22. The second was more unpleasing still. He admitted that he had told the story of the American Marconis privately to two friends on the Committee— Messrs. Falconer and Booth—who had kept the matter to themselves and had—or at least appeared to have—continually steered the Committee away from this dangerous ground. Rufus Isaacs' son actually says that his father "had informed Mr. Falconer and Mr. Handel Booth privately of these transactions, in order that they might be forearmed when the journalists came to give evidence."*

[* Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading, p. 256.]

On March 28 Lloyd George appeared before the Committee. Mrs. Charles Masterman gives an account of Rufus Isaacs grooming Lloyd George for the event:

There was a really very comic, though somewhat alarming, scene between Rufus and George on the following Sunday. George had to give evidence on the Monday—the following day—and Rufus discovered that George was still in a perfect fog as to what his transaction really had been, and began talking about "buying a bear." I have never seen Rufus so nearly lose his temper, and George got extremely sulky, while Rufus patiently reminded him what he had paid, what he still owed, when he had paid it, who to, and what for. It was on that occasion also that Charlie and Rufus tried to impress upon him with all the force in their power to avoid technical terms and to stick as closely as possible to the plainest and most ordinary language. As is well known, George made a great success of his evidence.* (Italics mine.)

[* C. F. G. Masterman, p. 255.]

I cannot imagine why she thought so. Hugh O'Donnell's description in the New Witness of Isaacs and Lloyd George as they appeared before the Committee accords perfectly with the impression produced by a reading of the evidence:

. . . While the simile of a panther at bay, anxious to escape, but ready with tooth and claw, might be applied to Sir Rufus Isaacs, something more like "a rat in a corner" might be suggested by the restless, snapping, furious little figure which succeeded. Let us compromise by saying that Mr. Lloyd George was singularly like a spitting, angry cat, which had got, perhaps, out of serious danger from her pursuers, but which caterwauled and spat and swore with vigour and venomousness quite surprising in that diminutive bulk. "Dastardly," "dishonourable," "disgraceful," "disreputable," "skulking," "cowardly!"

Asked why he had not mentioned his Marconi purchases in the House of Commons, Lloyd George gave two answers: (1) "There was no time on a Friday afternoon" (2) "I could not get up and take time when two Ministers had already spoken." Why had he not asked to be heard sooner by the Committee? He understood that Sir Rufus had expressed the willingness of all the accused Ministers to be heard. Like Sir Rufus, Lloyd George mentioned that he had lost money on his Marconi transactions.

The obstruction within the Committee continued to the end. The question had arisen whether Godfrey had had the right to sell the shares at his own price or for his own profit. He had sold a considerable number of shares to relations and friends at L1.1.3, whereas shares were sold to the general public at L3.5.0. Others of his shares he sold on the Stock Exchange at varying prices, all high. But were the shares his? Or did they belong to the English Company? If they were his he was entitled to sacrifice vast profits on some by selling at cost to his relations, and to take solid profits on others by selling at what he could get in the open market. But if he was simply selling as an agent of the Company, he had no right to make so fantastic a present of one lot of shares and was bound to hand over to the Company profits made on the others.

He told the Committee that the 500,000 shares had been sold to him outright but that he had passed on L46,000 of profits to the Company. He said that a record of this sale of 500,000 shares to him would be found in the minutes of the English Company. The books of the Company were inspected and it was found that no such minute existed. Lord Robert Cecil naturally wished to recall Godfrey Isaacs to explain the discrepancy between his statements and the records. The usual 8 to 6 majority decided that there was no need to recall Godfrey. It looked rather as if the shares Godfrey had sold to Harry and Harry to Rufus at such favourable prices belonged to—and should have been sold for the profit of—the Company.

On May 7 the Committee concluded its hearings and its members were marshalling their ideas for the Report. But there was one fact for them and the public still to learn. Early in June they were re-called to hear about it. A London stockbroker had absconded: a trustee was appointed to handle his affairs and it was discovered that the fleeing stockbroker had acted for the still absent Elibank, had indeed bought American Marconis for him—a total of 3000: and as it later appeared, these had been bought for the funds of the Liberal Party. The comment of The Times (June 9, 1913) on "the totally unnecessary difficulty which has been placed in the way of getting at the truth" seems moderate enough.

III. THE TRIAL OF CECIL CHESTERTON

Meanwhile the New Witness had not been neglecting its self-appointed task of striking at every point that looked vulnerable. On January 9, 1913, an article appeared attacking the city record of Mr. Godfrey Isaacs and listing the bankrupt companies—there were some twenty of them—of which he had been promoter or director. Some more ardent spirit in the New Witness office sent sandwichmen to parade up and down in front of Godfrey Isaacs' own office bearing a placard announcing his "Ghastly failures." Cecil Chesterton said later that he had not ordered this to be done, but he refused to disclaim responsibility. The placard was the last straw. Godfrey's solicitors wrote to Cecil saying that Godfrey would prosecute unless Cecil promised to make no further statement reflecting on his honour till both had given evidence before the Parliamentary Committee. Cecil replied: "I am pleased to hear that your client, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs, proposes to bring an action against me." And in the New Witness (February 27, 1913) he wrote: "We are up against a very big thing. . . . You cannot have the honour (and the fun) of attacking wealthy and powerfully entrenched interests without the cost. We have counted the cost; we counted it long ago. We think it good enough—much more than good enough."

The case came on at the Old Bailey on May 27. It is worth recalling the exact position at this time. The Parliamentary Committee had concluded its hearings three weeks earlier and was now preparing its report. (Cecil Chesterton had not given evidence before it, for though he had frequently demanded to be summoned, when at last the summons came he excused himself on the plea of ill-health and the further plea that he wished to reserve his evidence for his own trial.) the Matin case had been heard a couple of months earlier. Everything that was ever to be known about ministerial dealings in Marconis was by now known, except for Elibank's separate purchase on behalf of the Party Funds, which was made public just at the end of the trial.

Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith were again teamed, as in the Matin case. The charge was criminal libel. Cecil insisted on facing the charge alone. His various contributors had joined in the attack but Cecil would not give the names of the authors of unsigned articles and took full responsibility as Editor. Carson's opening speech for the Prosecution divided the six alleged libels under two main heads: One set, said Carson, charged Godfrey Isaacs with being a corrupt man who induced his corrupt brother to use his influence with the corrupt Samuel to get a corrupt contract entered into. The opening attack under this head has already been quoted. Later attacks did not diminish in violence: "the swindle or rather theft—impudent and barefaced as it is": "when Samuel was caught with his hand in the till (or Isaacs if you prefer to put it that way)."

The second set charged that Godfrey Isaacs had had transactions with various companies which, had the Attorney-General not been his brother, would have got him prosecuted. There is the same violence here: "This is not the first time in the Marconi affair that we find these two gentlemen [Godfrey and Rufus] swindling": and again: "the files at Somerset House of the Isaacs companies cry out for vengeance on the man who created them, who manipulated them, who filled them with his own creatures, who worked them solely for his own ends, and who sought to get rid of some of them when they had served his purpose by casting the expense of burial on to the public purse."