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the international situation. The letter comes to us from William Stearns Davis, of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr. Davis, who is the author of "A Friend of Cæsar" and other historical novels, is a member of the Department of History of the University of Minnesota.

A CHANCE IGNORED

He writes in part:

"I am an Eastern man and my opinions as to the duty of Americans touching the great war are substantially those of The Outlook; but, after witnessing the manner in which the Republican leaders in the Northwest have handled the international problem, I was not in the least surprised that Mr. Hughes seems to have carried this State by a very small majority.

"The real question of course in the election was the problem of the future foreign policy of America. About this the ordinary Scandinavian-American citizen knew little, and, barring a calamity which came home to him personally, he cared less. The sinking of the Lusitania was like the sinking of the Titanicthe act of an inscrutable Providence, very deplorable no doubt, but, like the great floods in China, something which did not touch him keenly. Nothing but a careful campaign of education could have made this population understand that it was best to vote against a policy which said, in the last analysis, 'Let well enough alone.' This education was never given. The Republican leaders' crawfished' and 'pussyfooted' in dealing with the European question in a manner that did little credit to their courage or practical insight. In the vain hope of catching a few proGerman votes they set up the stoppage of American mails as a grievance equal to if not greater than the murder of Americans, and hemmed and hawed a little about the Lusitania when in the same speeches they were shouting themselves black in the face about the sins of the Underwood tariff.

"Even the American rights issue was not placed as Eastern voters rightly perceived it. I have myself seen a circular avowedly in the Hughes interest attacking Wilson, not because he did so little about the submarine murders, but because he did so much! I doubt if such documents turned more than a very few ballots away from the President; the German vote seems to have divided 5050;' but I know for a fact that a great many pro-Ally votes in Minnesota were turned to

Wilson by t'is nominally Hughes' propaganda.

"The same politicians who were thus making 'tariff' and 'rural credits' the leading issues of the campaign heaved a sigh of relief when it appeared that Mr. Roosevelt had been headed off from visiting these parts to bring his whips against the hyphen.

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One year ago an intelligent campaign of education won over the majority of the voters of the Northwest to a belief in the need of reasonable military preparedness despite strong Bryanite predilections. A similar effort could more readily have made it clear to the prairies why it was needful to take a firm stand on foreign issues, even if such a stand might cost something; but where the voters obviously required a clear proof they were given only vague and dubious hinting.

"The men of the Northwest are quite as willing to fight and die for the old flag as the men of the East, but, thanks to their geographical remoteness, the European war has not wrought on their imaginations as it has on those of their Eastern brethren. They can be made to understand the great international issues now convulsing the world by a course of careful education and information, but this was utterly withheld from them by the Republican leaders. If Minnesota has given Mr. Hughes a very scant plurality, and North Dakota, its sister State, has given no plurality at all, it is because they have heard the old protective tariff tom-tom being beaten as if it were the chief tocsin of the campaign, and all that was said of Mr. Wilson's foreign policy were scattered hints about his vacillation.' Mr. Hughes personally may not have been to blame for this, but his lieutenants and campaign managers will not escape the full responsibility that comes from a policy of deliberate silence and cowardice. Verily they have their reward.

"The voters of the Northwest did not make a deliberate choice between 'peace at any price' and National honor' in the last election. They were not given the chance."

The writers of the letters which we have quoted voted for different candidates, and for different reasons; but behind all their criticism and explanation of election returns there seems to be one thing in common: they all wanted to vote Nationally and they all wanted to vote progressively. We repeat that these letters contain hopeful portents for the future political development of the country.

F

MR. ASQUITH AND
AND THE
THE ENGLISH

POLITICAL CRISIS

BY SYDNEY BROOKS1

OR an Englishman the cabled despatches from London during the past few days had so familiar a sound as to bring on almost an attack of homesickness. Asquith Must Go." "Revolt Against the

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British Premier." "Cabinet Dissensions : Will Asquith Resign?"-so ran the headlines. And below them were columns of more or less shrewd, more or less excited speculation as to whether this, the fifth or sixth, attack in force against the Prime Minister since the war began would succeed, and, if it did, who would take his place? It was all, as I have said, very familiar. We in England have lived on that sort of diet pretty constantly in the past two and a half years. We have been wrought up time and again to a state of high expectancy over changes in the Cabinet and in the Premiership. The changes in the Cabinet, or some of them, have taken place. There is to-day, as there has been for eighteen months and more, a national and non-party Government, while in August, 1914, there was a Cabinet wholly composed of Liberals. No one could possibly have foreseen when the war broke out that it would be waged in December, 1916, by the men who a bare week ago actually formed the British Ministry. As in all the belligerent lands, some men have unexpectedly collapsed beneath the touchstone of war, and others, not less unexpectedly, have risen above themselves to the full height of its demands. I think I am right in saying that only one British Cabinet Minister was holding last week the office he held at the beginning of the war. That Minister was Mr. Asquith. Repeatedly assailed, derided, criticised, and against a growing volume of conviction that his temperament and training are not those that make him an ideal pilot for a storm, he still remained the head of the British Cabinet. But now has he gone? Has a great Premiership closed in dissension and defeat?

What has been the note of his career? More than anything else, I should say, the note of Mr. Asquith's career is a consistent capacity for rising to the occasion. He has never, to my knowledge, failed in anything he has been

1 Mr. Brooks is a well-known English writer and corre spondent, now in this country, who knows English political life intimately.-THE EDITORS.

One gets, indeed,

called upon to undertake. almost a sense of monotony from a survey of his achievements. As a boy he captured all the school prizes; as a youth he won the Balliol, took a double first, became President of the Oxford Union, and carried off the Craven; a few years later, after a wholesome period of struggle and difficulty, he was recognized as one of the most effective of English advocates; in Parliament he attracted Gladstone's favoring notice with almost his first speech. And it has all been done without theatricality or self-advertisement, with no attempt to dazzle his contemporaries or force their applause, and without the least assistance from those advantages of birth, wealth, and social connections that in the England of the pre-war days, more perhaps than in any other country, smoothed the path of political and legal ambition.

Asquith's career is as fully a structure of his own rearing as Lloyd George's or John Burns's; he has made his own way on his own merits; he might have stood alongside of the present Minister for War and the exPresident of the Local Government Board as a product and representative of that newer England in which even before the war men were being judged and rewarded for what they were and for what they did, and not for the non-essentials of lineage or means or social position; and yet he has never touched the imagination of the country as they have done, or roused in it a passion either of enthusiasm or of detestation. There is something of coldness in the popular conception of, and attitude towards, the late Premier; he is not one of the men, as Lloyd George most decidedly is, whom you are violently for or violently against; even his own followers regard him with pride, respect, admiration, and an implicit confidence in his all but unfailing adequacy, rather than with affection. I never, indeed, think of him and of his relations to public sentiment without also thinking of another very great man, like him a lawyer, an administrator, and a statesman of the highest competence, and yet, like him, somewhat shut off from the innermost hearts of men-I mean Mr. Elihu Root. Mr. Asquih is not a bit more sparing than is Mr.

Root of the fuss and flourishes that democracies love. Both men would probably stand higher in the judgment of the unthinking, easily tickled mob if they had not so rigidly eschewed the artifices that most politicians cultivate even to ostentation. One can imaginé neither man indulging in a beau geste. Both are as deliberately undramatic and nonsensational as human beings can be. You look in vain for purple patches in the career or the oratory of either. Both make the mistake of doing things, or appearing to do them, too easily. With a slightly different temperament, Mr. Root's position in American public life would long ago have been on a par with his unique capacities. Of Mr. Asquith, as of Sir Robert Peel, posterity may say that if only his personality had equaled his performances he would have been the greatest of all British Premiers.

As it is, the real Asquith, whose praises are sung by his friends, whom all children instinctively delight in the man of quick, vivid, and hearty emotions, of genial considerateness, of warm and tolerant humanity— goes almost unsuspected by the general public; and Lord Rosebery never surprised England more than when he went bail for it that Mr. Asquith possessed qualities of heart event more remarkable than his qualities of head. The average man remains to this day unconvinced. He finds in Mr. Asquith few of those amiable and attractive weaknesses and accomplishments that irresistibly engage the popular interest. Nobody disputes the genuineness of his abilities or affects to deny that he has amply earned every success he has won. Yet nobody is really thrilled by him. A somewhat hard, self-centered embodiment of all the efficiencies; one whom it is difficult to think of as ever having been young, expansive, and indiscreet; not without a touch of Oxford arrogance ; apt to treat stupidity as a crime; a first-class fighting man, always at the top of his form and able at any moment to bring all his powers into play, yet somehow spoiling the effect of his triumphs by the dry and unsympathetic self-assurance with which he enters the lists and the mechanical regularity with which he routs his antagonists-it is in such ways as these that the British public, no wiser than any other public in judging its leaders, thinks of Mr. Asquith.

The deficiency which I am trying to bring out-it is more readily felt than expressedis palpable in Mr. Asquith's speeches. They

are just as good as any public speaking can be that has not behind it a genuine oratorical inspiration. They are models of clearness and precision; few speakers, indeed, can pack so much into so few words as Mr. Asquith; they are full of vigorous thought, of trenchant and sonorous diction; they are admirably arranged; stroke follows upon stroke without hesitation and with direct and compelling force; and yet they are as unmistakably not oratory as George Eliot's verse is not poetry. The reason, I think, is that Mr. Asquith has himself too completely in hand, knows to a nicety just what he is going to say and how he is going to say it, and is never for a moment in danger of being carried out of himself. The color and rhythm, the exaltation and abandon, of oratory are not for him. There is something, indeed, almost mechanically impersonal about Mr. Asquith's air on a public platform and when he rises to address the House. He seems independent of all emotional communion with his audience. I have often wondered, while listening to him, whether he would not speak equally well to no audience at all or to one of broomsticks.

The

And yet, even as I write that, I am conscious of doing him less than justice. For in the past two and a half years I know of no one who has stated the British case or appraised the issues between Germany and the Allies in language more majestic, more powerful, or more pertinent than his. war has not implanted in him the native fire of eloquence that is of the essence, for example, of Mr. Lloyd George's whole being. A man possesses that gift by right of birth or he does not possess it at all. But the great struggle and his own great part in it have wrought upon Mr. Asquith until his speeches have been lit by a glow and passion unfelt, or at any rate unexpressed, before. Let me quote from what he said on the second anniversary of the war—it is a fair sample of the Asquith style:

"Early in the war I quoted a sentence which Mr. Gladstone used in 1870. 'The greatest triumph of our time,' he said, has been the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics.' Mr. Gladstone worked all his life for

that noble purpose. He did not live to see its attainment. By the victory of the Allies the enthronement of public right here in Europe will pass from the domain of ideals and of aspirations into that of concrete and

1916

MR. ASQUITH AND THE ENGLISH POLITICAL CRISIS

achieved realities. What does public right mean? I will tell you what I understand it to mean an equal level of opportunity and of independence as between small states and great states, as between the weak and the strong; safeguards resting upon the common will of Europe, and, I hope, not of Europe alone, against aggression, against international covetousness and bad faith, against the wanton resort in case of dispute to the use of force and the disturbance of peace; finally, as the result of it all, a great partnership of nations federated together in the joint pursuit of a freer and fuller life for countless millions who by their efforts and their sacrifice, generation after generation, maintain the progress and enrich the inheritance of humanity."

Those, obviously, are the words of a man of intellect and culture, not without vision, not without sympathy, but-who does not feel it? with his emotional side held severely captive to his brain. They are impressive, but they do not thrill. They are weighty, but they are not vital. I hope posterity will read them. But for myself I would far sooner have heard Mr. Lloyd George handling the same theme in his own incomparable style. For Mr. Lloyd George answers Pascal's test. You forget, when sitting beneath him, that you are listening to a speech. remember only that you are listening to a man. You hardly ever remember that when you are listening to Mr. Asquith; and it is this habitual self-repression that very largely accounts for the fact that the ex-Premier is a greater figure in Parliament than in the country, and that among the masses of the people his personality has never been the invaluable asset that Gladstone's was.

You

There have been many occasions in the past eight years of his Premiership when Mr. Asquith has gained far more than he has lost by having been pitched in a minor key. Our normal British preferences in normal times are for men with a certain energetic moderation of speech and bearing. Mr. Asquith possesses this quality as few men have ever possessed it; and it repeatedly stood out in the days before the war in piquant contrast to the harangues and demeanor of some of his colleagues. Vehemently as the Tories and the Protectionists and the Irish Unionists might fulminate against him, they at least preferred him to Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Winston Churchill; and one of their stock amusements was to heckle him in the House

803

after one or the other or both of his brilliant lieutenants had committed some characteristic indiscretion that must have jarred on no one's nerves more than on his. Mr. Asquith was never" brilliant.” He was quite content to be outshone by colleagues more restless than himself or with a more taking manner on a

public platform. public platform. But there was never any real doubt among those on the inside of things as to where lay the true seat of power and authority. His political opponents pretended to doubt it. For years they were busily assuring the world that the Prime Minister was a mere figurehead in his own Cabinet, that the real control of affairs was in Mr. Lloyd George's or Mr. Churchill's hands, and that Mr. Asquith, besides being the shuttlecock of more forceful spirits, was the obsequious slave of Mr. Redmond. And thousands no doubt believed it, because in politics people will believe anything. Yet there never was a more fantastic misapprehension.

I venture, indeed, to say that there has been no stronger Prime Minister than Mr. Asquith since Gladstone's resignation—no Prime Minister, I mean, more sure of himself, more competent to impose his will, with a greater instinct for leadership, or with a firmer grasp over policy and administration alike. If there is one thing Asquith never has been and never could be, it is a timeserving politician. In the old days of his Home Secretaryship-now nearly twentyfive years ago—when for a while he was the idol of labor, when he was stretching all the powers of his office in the cause of social and industrial reform, and when he was filling the nation with a new sense of its responsibilities, he none the less on three crucial questions did not hesitate to stand up to labor in the country and to his political allies in the House of Commons when he was convinced that the public interest demanded it. A flabby and squeezable person is precisely what Asquith is not. Look at the record of his Cabinet from 1908 to 1914. He presided over a Government unique in British annals for the many-sided energy of its reforming vigor. He conducted a profound constitutional revolution to a successful issue; and in 1911 he faced and quelled the most surprising and sinister outbreak of social and industrial discontent that has ever threatened the internal peace of the British Isles.

But there is one set of values in time of

peace and another and a very different set in time of war. What a democracy needs at the head of its affairs when it is engaged in a fight for sheer existence is a man who will take big risks and make sharp decisions, who will rouse and rely upon its heroic potentialities, who will mirror its martial soul. These are functions which Mr. Asquith is by no means as competent to discharge as Mr. Lloyd George. He is getting on in years; he is past the time of life when a man still has a large reservoir of energy to draw upon in a crisis; there is in him an inclination, not towards indolence he is and always has been a hard worker-but towards doing no more than is necessary; he has a natural relish for the pleasant relaxations of life; work with him is a habit, but it is not, as it is with Mr. Lloyd George, an instinct; he prefers, if he can, to find a way out of diffi culties rather than through them; he is rather too apt to trust to his unrivaled Parliamentary dexterity as a means of evading a troublesome situation and then to persuade himself that because he has evaded it it will trouble him no more; as a lawyer his preferences are all on the side of taking one step at a time, with the minimum of violence to constitutional usage, established customs, and the precedents of peace; something is always counseling him to avoid making a decision to-day if it can possibly be postponed till

to-morrow.

Mr. Asquith showed these attributes clearly enough before the war. They were conspicuous, for instance, in his treatment of the Ulster movement organized by Sir Edward Carson. They have been, as one would naturally expect, not less conspicuous since the outbreak of the war. With another type of leader in control, the British nation would have accepted universal military service long before it did, would have shut down on the drink traffic completely and at a stroke instead of partially and by slow degrees, would have adopted with enthusiasm a programme of enforced economy, and would by now have arrayed itself down to the last able-bodied man and the last ablebodied woman for compulsory war work. The fatal words, "Too late," which have had so often to be written as the finis to British enterprises in this war might never have been written at all had the Prime Minister been a man of bigger imagination and greater driving power and more skilled to read and appeal to the fighting temper of the nation.

It is the essence of the charge against Mr. Asquith that he has been too dilatory and legalistic, not sufficiently resourceful, unwilling or unable to take the leaps in the dark that have to be taken in such times as these, and too slow to cut adrift from the notion that a war can be run by a debating society. Hence a Cabinet much too large for quick executive action. Hence a tendency to consider measures, not from the standpoint of winning the war-which is the only thing the nation cares about-but from the standpoint of whether or not a good case could be made out for them in Parliament. Hence, too, hesitations, a lack of sure grip, and a failure to impress the people that every ounce of administrative energy was being brought directly to bear on the problems of the war.

But, in spite of everything, Mr. Asquith has the very highest claims on the gratitude of the British nation. He has stated, as I said, the British case in language of rare nobility. He has never once shown the smallest signs of nervousness or despondency. His courage has had the solidity of a rock. Amid the appalling anxieties and the grievous disappointments of the war he has maintained an unfaltering front, always cool, always master of himself, the very embodiment of sturdy British strength. Moreover, practicaily the whole management of Parliament, at a time when parties were in a chaos of dissolution, when new issues were forcing almost every day new alignments, and when not merely Cabinet Ministers but the entire theory and practice of Cabinet government had to be sacrificed, has fallen on his shoulders. I do not think they could have fallen on better shoulders. For Mr. Asquith has not only a rich and varied assortment of Parliamentary gifts and experience, can not only present a case to the House of Commons in the way most likely to insure its success, but has also the confidence and the respect of the Assembly to a degree that no other man approaches. His judgment, his character, his intellectual power, and his prestige have been assets that the country could not have done without. For winning the war, for inspiring the nation to keep to the heroic pitch, for real and consistent insight into the emotions of the people, for audacity both in methods and in conceptions, for moral leadership, and for flaming and contagious energy Mr. Lloyd George is the better man. But he might not on that account and in every respect prove the better Prime Minister.

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