A shortened history of England
Boer War to the War of 1914-18. The last Liberal Ministry
The close of the Nineteenth
Century, the South African War, and the death of the Queen and of Lord
Salisbury, coincided so nearly in time as to mark the end of an epoch.
The Victorian age had been a long period of ever-increasing prosperity
at home, of gradual uninterrupted, pacific transition from the old to
the new society and of peace and security for Britain in her most
important foreign relationships.
But the first two decades of the
new century involved the world in the greatest catastrophe of modern
times, and even before that catastrophe had taken place, the relations
of nations, races, and classes had taken on a hard and hostile aspect.
Man’s power over nature far outstripped his moral and mental
development. In a single generation came the motor-car, wireless
telegraphy, and the conquests of the air and the world under the sea.
Such inventions, and the application on a colossal scale of older
processes of stream and electricity, were perpetually transmuting the
economic, social, and international fabric before it had time to
solidify; speed and mechanism destroyed the older habits of life and
thought in our island, and began the suburbanization of the rural
landscape; throughout the world, nations and races were linked up too
suddenly for their peace; and national ambitions found ready to their
hands new weapons of conquest and self-aggrandizement which have proved
the means of mutual destruction.
The
South African War, about which the Liberal party had been divided in
opposition, left the Conservatives with a large majority after the
‘Khaki election’ of 1900, to begin the business of the new century. The
two leading Ministers were Arthur Balfour, Salisbury’s nephew and
successor in the Premiership, and Joseph Chamberlain, who as Colonial
Secretary had done so much to arouse the British Empire to a state of
self-consciousness.
Balfour’s Act of 1902, inspired by
the wisdom of the great civil servant Sir Robert Morant, added another
story to the edifice of National Education begun in 1870; it handed over
the responsibility not only for elementary but for higher education to
the County Councils and County Boroughs. In this way Secondary Education
for the first time received proper financial support, and was
coordinated with the rest of the national system. The new local
authority- the Education Committee of each County Council- was able to
devise broader schemes of policy than the old School Boards, which had
often administered too small an area.
The reform has resulted in a great
enlargement of secondary schools, and the erection of a ‘ladder’ by
which able students of small means can ascend through them to the
Universities. Improved Secondary Education has raised the average
standard of work and intelligence at Oxford and Cambridge by opening
them to many more able men of all classes; and it has been the making of
he new Universities that sprang up space in the new century, at
Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Bristol, in addition to
London, Durham, and Manchester Universities founded in the previous
century but come to full maturity in our own.
At this stage, the waning fortune
of Unionist Conservatism was put to a hazard calculated wither to check
or to precipitate its ruin. Joseph Chamberlain, with a vigour unmatched
since Gladstone’s advocacy of Home Rule, preached the doctrine of
Protection, renamed Tariff Reform. The motive that first impelled him to
this audacity was the desire to link the Dominions to the Mother Country
by a system of Imperial Preference. Without it, he believed, the bonds
of Empire would ere long be relaxed. The difficulty was that Great
Britain could not give effective preference to Canada and Australasia
without placing a tax on foreign foodstuffs, to be remitted In the case
of Dominion products. And in England popular tradition had a vague but
hostile memory of the old ‘Corn Laws’; greybeards told tales of the
‘hungry forties’, when taxed bread was scarce on their parents’ tables.
Imperial Preference, therefore,
was a bad election cry. Moreover, after the South African War, the
country had had enough Empire for a while; so Chamberlain’s Preferential
Tariff, in the hands of his insular fellow countrymen, was soon moulded
by the Conservatives into a scheme of which the prime object was the
protection of British goods. This aroused the enthusiasm and opened the
purse strings of many British manufacturers. But their zeal was suspect
to the consumer, especially to the working man with his family budget to
consider. Free Trade doctrine was very strong in all sections of the
community; it had behind it fifty years of unchallenged authority and
custom; caution and tradition, usual mainstays of the Conservative
party, supported the Liberal economic thesis. Moreover the prosperity of
British commerce under the Free Trade system was not yet shaken. The
world’s markets were not yet closed to our goods by nationalist foreign
governments to the extent that they have been closed since the Great
War. Joseph Chamberlain in his lifetime was beaten by still obstinate
prosperity of our staple industries. He could prophesy their ruin, but
its coming was delayed.
Indeed, the great interest that
most required protection in the first years of the new century was
agriculture. Ever since 1875 foodstuffs from America and the entire
world had come flooding into Great Britain on a scale never foreseen in
the day of Cobden and Peel, when prices had been steadied, not smashed,
by free importation form Europe. But, with the prairies and the pampas
developed as Britain’s food farm, it was becoming impossible to grow
food at a profit in the island. English farm hands, badly paid and
housed even in good times, were now deserting the land for the cities at
an appalling rate. Great Britain was on the way to becoming urbanized
altogether, unlike any other county in the world. A check ought to have
been put to this catastrophe, which would be irremediable when once
complete. Unfortunately the protection of British agriculture was the
proposal that politicians were most afraid to advocate, though something
might be done under cover of Colonial Preference. The Free Trade system
under which Britain had so long flourished had little regard for
agriculture. Food was the currency in which foreign nations and own
Dominions paid for British manufactured goods. And cheap corn and meat
was of great value to the wage-earning community. The absence of a
democratic peasant-proprietorship like that of the European Continent
made it difficult to advocate agricultural Protection. The field
labourer, long ill-used by the farmer, scarcely knew whether he wished
agriculture to be protected; he could slip off to the nearest town or
mining district and get a better wage and eat his cheap food there. The
most effective popular appeal of Chamberlain’s opponents was the
unsavoury memory of the old Corn Laws. The fear of dear foodstuffs and
the cry of the ‘small loaf’. So it is only after the Great
War has shaken party traditions and old economic doctrines, and the
German submarine has shown the use of the plough in Britain, that any
attempt, and that quite insufficient, was made by subsidies and control
of imports to maintain food production within the island and so save
little of what is still left of country life, while securing by statute
a minimum wage to the field labourer. That all life in Britain should
become urban and suburban, while her fields fall back to jungle, would
be a horrible disaster, for strategic, human, and social reasons more
important than any purely economic consideration.
The result of eh General Election
of 1906 was like an earthquake. There had been nothing approaching it
since the destruction of the old Tory party in the first election after
the Great Reform Bill, and that had been the consequence of an entirely
new electoral system. In 1906 the net Liberal gain was 273. The Liberals
in the new Parliament numbered 397; the Irish Nationalists 83; the
Unionists who had ruled the last Parliament were reduced to 157. And,
most significant of all, a Labour party of 50 members had suddenly
sprung into existence.
The overturn, which took everyone
by surprise, was significant of a greater tendency to mass emotion in
the large modern electorate, bred in great cities, and less tied up by
party traditions than the old. There have been other such elections
since. Moreover the issues of 1906 had all been unfavourable to the late
government –the Education Act, Protection, Taff Vale, and the recent
introduction of indentured Chinese Labour into the South African gold
mines, which seemed a sorry outcome of the great Imperialist War. But
behind all these things was something more fundamental. A new generation
had arisen, wanting new things, and caring more about ‘social reform’ at
home than about ‘Imperialism’ in Ireland, South Africa, or anywhere
else.
Whatever party or doctrine would
be the ultimate gainer, the old forms of Imperialism and Conservative
Unionism were ever again to hold power. Protection, indeed, had a
future. But the Conservatism that has held power since the war of
1914-18, as an alternative often preferred to Labour governments, has
been liberal in its outlook on Irish, Egyptian, South African, and
Indian questions, and semi-socialist in its outlook on the duties of the
State to the working class. Meanwhile until 1914 the Liberal Party bore
rule for the last time, in close though uneasy alliance with Labour, and
left a deep impress on social legislation.
Balfour’s last great reform
leaving office in 1905 had been the establishment of the Committee of
Imperial Defence. It was developed by Asquith’s government as a means
for laying plans for the possible event of war. Its functions are
consultative only; it provides the Cabinet with information and advice,
and its decision can only be carried into effect by Parliament or by
Departments of State. As it is not an executive body, its composition is
fluid. The Prime Minister summons whom he thinks fit-generally the
Secretary for War, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Foreign
Secretary, and the technical advisers required for the questions under
discussion at each particular meeting. The Committee has, however, a
Secretary of its own, whose permanence in a constantly changing body
gives him great importance. Sir Maurice Hankey, now Lord Hankey, as
Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence from 1912 and Secretary
of the Cabinet form 1916, has left his impress on our growing
institutions.
For ten years, December 1905 to
May 1915, Great Britain was ruled, for the last time, by a Liberal
Government. Its leaders were men of unusual personality and power. There
was Haldane, the soft-spoken lawyer-philosopher who won the confidence
of the soldiers and reformed the Army; John Morley, the veteran of the
Radical intellectualism of the last century, who was now on behalf of
the British Government to cope with the new problem on national
self-consciousness in India; there was Edward Grey, remote, firm, and
sadly serene at the Foreign Office; there was young Winston Burchill
looking round for his kingdom; and there was Lloyd George, on whom time
and great events should fix many diverse labels, mutually contradictory
but all true. And coming on there were such able administrators and
legislators as Herbert Samuel, Walter Runciman, and Reginald McKenna.
The working classes were represented for the first time in a Cabinet, by
John Burns, a personality hewn out of old English oak. For a decade all
these men most astonishingly held together, for two successive Prime
Ministers knew their business: Campbell-Bannerman, an easy-tempered but
shrewd Scot, who say quite through the souls of men, started his team of
colleagues in harmony; won the confidence of the raw and restive legion
of Liberal recruits in the House; pacified South Africa by reversing the
policy of Milner and granting responsible government before it was too
late; then died in 1908, his tasks accomplished. He was succeeded by
Asquith, a Yorkshireman of high integrity and unshakeable nerve, with a
skill in advocacy learnt in the law and applied to politics, sound
judgment to choose well between the opinions of others, and a rare skill
in manipulating discordant colleagues.
The great achievement of this last
Liberal Ministry was the initiation of measures of social reform on a
scale beyond all precedent. Old Age Pensions, on a non-contributory
basis, helped to empty the workhouses, to give happiness to the old and
relieve their loyal sons and daughters of part at least of the burden of
their maintenance. Democratic Budgets shifted more taxation on to the
wealthy. Workmen’s Compensation, Miners’ Eight Hours, Medical Inspection
of Children, and the Children’s Bill, the Town Planning Act, the Sweated
Industries Act, measures of Unemployment and Health Insurance, and the
Small Holdings Act for rural districts formed part of a vast programme
of laws placed on the Statute Book. Such measures, implemented by
municipal bodies, and extended by the work of Care Committees, Play
Centres, Boy Scouts, Adult Education, and other such activities outside
the harsh discords of politics, together with constantly advancing
medical science and practice, have in the present health and happiness,
reduced the death-rate, and prolonged the average of human life by
several years, and begun a more even distribution of the national income
and opportunities for happiness.
The function of Local Government
had undergone immense extension under modern democracy. It is looked to
now not merely to remove public nuisances, to supply sanitation,
lighting, and roads, but to act for the personal benefit of the
individual citizen. It is to Local Government, controlled and aided by
the State Offices in Whitehall, that he poorer citizen is beginning to
look to supply the house he lives in; the electric light and gas he
uses; free education for his children –from infant schools to University
scholarships; medical clinics and isolation hospitals; books form the
free library; baths and swimming; cricket fields and ‘green to take the
family to work or school; and a hundred other benefits to make life
kind.
What was
behind the change?
J.S.Mill
doctrine which advocated freedom and stressed the idea to women to vote.
Conservatives and hose of lords showed more resistance (they presented
resistance and not violent).
Benjamin
convinced this party to accept, using arguments.
Which
arguments? Conviction of the transition of democratization by presenting
the matter as a serious issue, all that in case that conservatives and
lords accept the Bill.
In 1867
workers were infertile, in 1868 there were elections: what was happened
in this election? Liberals won the elections. It was the liberal party
which had given workers the right to vote. That’s why workers voted for
liberals. It was the first time that workers vote and give all their
voices to the liberal party. So, they were supported by workers.
Glad Stone
wrote reforms which brought advantages to the population after election;
among them elementary Education Act of 1870. Education of children was
vested, it was left in the hands of the church in general or churchmen
and government did not have a say in this field. Government did not
assist financially speaking this church in terms of money and in terms
of syllabus. Government did not intervene in the education of children,
nor in any other issues than (economic, trade, is left to the private
company). There were no programs or educational systems established nor
a definite program. So these children were learning reading and writing
only.
Note:
among the reforms is given by Glad Stone was this Elementary Education
Act in 1870.
The
churchmen needed assistance; if the government was to intervene so there
were conditions imposed by the government. The churchmen were afraid by
these conditions.
Denomination: there were many denominations because the churchmen
(Christians) teach with their beliefs and ways. That’s why there were
many denominations. So, each denomination has a specific religious
aspect and education. Here, there is no consequence, each branch teach
its specific way and belief, but it should be common (Standardisation of
Education). The questions which should be asked:
·
What made this government intervene?
·
What made this government change its
attitude?
·
What did happened before Elementary
Education Act in 1870?
There was
a kind of economic crises (collapse), it was an emergence of European
powers as competitors (Germany, USA to British companies).
·
What did happen to British?
·
What happened to cause such an
economic collapse?
The
British were the first to invent but they did not developed, they did
not go further to technology and science. European countries took the
British technology and science and developed it. With the development of
other European countries, British appeared as a traditional; i.e. this
resulted in the fact that what was new in first in technology, it became
through time traditional and archaic.
