The New Sense of Time

Transcription

1 The New Sense of Time 31

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3 The silent social revolution had not happened overnight. Different though the political order had become, the change, marked by the three milestones of the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884, had been spread over more than fifty years, and the results of the first act, as we have seen, were far less sweeping than the furor attending its passage had suggested. More immediately evident was the physical transformation that came with the city and the railroad. But it was the new concept of time which had the most profound effect upon the Victorian spirit. And here again the railroad played a principal role. In a supersonic age it is hard to imagine the psychological adjustment required when the maximum speed to which people had been accustomed, fifteen miles an hour at the outside for fast coaches De Quincey, in The English Mall-Coach, timed the London-Glasgow mall at twelve gave way by mid-century to the express train s forty or fifty. The railroad did more than any other Victorian innovation to infiltrate the national consciousness with the idea of speed. Turner s painting Rain, Steam and Speed a train hurtling through a downpour is more than a work of art: like the numerous exclamatory descriptions that adventure some early riders wrote in their diaries and letters, it is a historical document. Hitherto, time had been measured by the slow progress of a summer day, or, even more rudimentarily, by the growth rate of the countryside -a season for a crop to mature, most of a generation for a row of trees to reach full height. (The traditional conservatism of landowning men could doubtless be attributed to the time-sense acquired in a lifetime of watching things grow; the impatience ascribed to political radicals, their demand for reform at once, was incomprehensible to farmers accustomed to the slow evolution of plants.) Now the shadow creeping across a sundial was replaced by the minute hand of a packet watch as its owner anxiously compared it with a railway timetable. A steamship now could cut the Atlantic crossing time by one-half. In steam-powered factories, vast quantities of goods were produced in a small fraction of the time it once took to fabricate them by hand. Beginning in the middle forties as a railroading device, the electric telegraph sent messages across hundreds of miles in a few seconds. Newspapers, with their upto-the-minute coverage of events made possible by the telegraph and, later, the submarine cable, and by steam presses turning out tens of thousands of copies within a single hour, contributed still mare to the feeling of immediacy. Even art ceased to be long as the invention of photography made possible instant portraiture of people and scenes. R. J. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas, London, Dent,

4 THE 1832 REFORM BILL Lecture 6 Politics in Victorian and Edwardian Britain Economic crisis. Under-representation in Parliament. Rotten boroughs. The Reform. The role of the working class. Consequences of 1832 Reform Bill on Enghish. politics. -a mass basis for the Liberal Party -workers and parliamentary politics. CHARTISM Before: luddism. The People s Charter. Feargus O Connor. FURTHIER ELECTORAL REFORMS 1867 Second Reform (Disraeli) 1884 Third Reform Act (Gladstone) 1872 Ballot Act WOMEN 1918 Act gave the franchise to all women aged 30 or more 1928 Equal Franchise Act brought the minimum age for women down to 21. GLADSTONE ( ) AND SOCIAL REFORM Forster Act (education reform), DISRAELI ( ) AND ONE-NATION CONSERVATISM Two nations [the rich and the poor] between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy ; who are as ignorant of each other s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets ; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws. (Sybil) THE RISE OF LABOUR H. M. Hyndman ( ) created the Social Democratic Federation (SDF)(1884). Socialist League split off from the SDF. William Morris: News from Nowhere (1891). Fabian Society (founded in 1884). George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Wave of trade-union agitation (dockers strike, 1889) creation of the Scottish Labour Party (Keir Hardie). 1900: Labour Representation Committee was founded. 1906: the name changed into Labour Party. 32

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6 Harold Macmillan, The Past Masters, London, Macmillan, was the year of Lloyd George s first Budget, soon to be known as The People s Budget. In modem terms, the sums involved seem modest. He had to provide for the Old Age Pensions the first national pension scheme in our history was passed in He had also to meet a heavy demand for naval construction. In the course of the Pensions Bill he let slip a phrase which became famous and a gift to cartoonists. I have no nest eggs. I am looking for someone s hen-roost to rob next year. But the robbing was on a very small scale. Income tax was raised from 1s. to 1s. 2d. and a super-tax (as it was then called) of 6d. was imposed on all incomes over 5,ooo. A rise in death duties (then moderate enough), a small increase on spirits and tobacco that was all the immediate addition. But coupled with this was the famous scheme for Land Taxes, intended primarily to tax an unlearned increment. This, the first of several attempts (fruitless) in the last half-.century or more, caused a violent storm. The attack was not on developers (as they have come to be called) but on landlords. A bitter contest followed, which altered political history and was to lead, in due course, to virtual single-chamber government. In fact, the Finance Bill, which was ill-drawn and very complicated, had been so amended as to prove almost unworkable. If the Tory leaders had been wise, they would have been satisfied by this achievement in Committee stage. But they were not wise they were led (greatly to Lloyd George s delight and relief) to throw out the Bill in the House of Lords. This produced another famous phrase. A Conservative Member had rashly praised the House of Lords as watchdog of the Constitution. The retort was memorable. You mean it is Mr Balfour s poodle. In the long conflict which followed Lloyd George played a leading role. There were two General Elections in 1910, and although in the United Kingdom the Liberal and Conservatives were practically equal on both occasions, the Government could rely on the support of the forty odd Labour Members and the Irish contingent of eighty. For this, of course, a price had to be paid. For the former it was modest, 400 a year Parliamentary salary. For the latter, it was of vast implications Home Rule for Ireland. In this long-drawn-out campaign Lloyd George distinguished himself by the vitality and violence of his attack. Asquith, emulating Panders, delivered sonorous passages of limpid eloquence. Lloyd George, like Cleon, let them have it. At Limehouse, he went for the Dukes, especially of Northumberland and Westminster, with their leaseholds of ever-increasing value. At Newcastle, it was Dukes again; fully equipped Dukes cost as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts: they were just as great a terror and they lasted longer. At Wolverhampton there was a general attack on the hereditary principle. They have no qualification at least they need not have any. They do not have to have a medical certificate... they only require a certificate of birth just to prove they are the first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on these principles. All this sounds very small beer now. But sixty years or more ago it was quite exciting and, from a Chancellor of the Exchequer, unusual. But Lloyd George was not merely an agitator. He was a builder. With Old Age Pensions and National Insurance he opened up a new era. Many people, of all parties, had studied the problem of poverty. Lloyd George did something about it. He can indeed claim to be the founder of the Welfare State. Whether he would have approved all its developments is hard to say. For he believed, like all men of peasant stock, in hard toil, self-respect and self-reliance. The restriction of the Lords veto powers to a delay of two years led inevitably to a crisis in the summer of For then the Home Rule Bill would pass into law and the clash would come. At first, many Liberals treated the threat of Ulster resistance as bluff. But as the months passed, the danger grew. At last, following something like a mutiny in the Army, we seemed in July 1914 to be drifting towards the cataract. But, by the bullet of an assassin at Sarajevo, a tragic stream of events was set in motion which brought us not to civil war in Ireland but to the First World War. 34

7 H.H. Asquith on the Lords rejection of the Budget, 2 December 1909 (Hansard, 5th ser., 13: ). The PRIME MINISTFR (Mr. Asquith) moved, That the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provision made by this House for the Service of the year is a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons. We are met here this afternoon under circumstances which are unexampled in the history of the British Parliament... When a short time ago the Finance Bill received its third reading, and as it left this House, it represented, I believe, in a greater degree than can be said of any measure of our time, the matured, the well-sifted, the deliberate work of an overwhelming majority of the representatives of the people, upon a matter which, by the custom of generations, and by the course of a practically unbroken authority, is the province of this House and of this House alone. In the course of a week, or little more than a week, the whole of this fabric has been thrown to the ground I come to the course the only course which, in the circumstances, is the Government, without either breaking the law or sacrificing constitutional principle, to pursue. That course is advise, as we have advised the Crown, to dissolve this Parliament at the earliest possible moment The truth is that all this talk about the duty or the right of the House of Lords to refer measures to the people is, in the light of our practical and actual experience, the hollowest outcry of political cant... The sum and substance of the matter is that the House of Lords rejected the Finance Bill last Tuesday, not because they love the people, but because they hate the Budget... The real question which emerges from the political struggles in this country for the last 30 years is not whether you will have a single or a double chamber system of government, but whether when the Tory Party is in power the House of Commons shall be omnipotent, and whether when the Liberal Party is in power the House of Lords shall be omnipotent The House of Lords have deliberately chosen their ground. They have elected to set at nought in regard to finance the unwritten and time-honoured conventions of our Constitution. In so doing, whether they foresaw it or not, they have opened out a wider and a more far-reaching issue. We have not provoked the challenge, but we welcome it... 35