Philip Snowden
Winston S. Churchill
[Reprinted from the book, Great Contemporaries,
originally published by W.W. Norton & Company, 1932]
What sort of picture does the average man and woman make of the
political figures of the present day? How far is it removed from the
truth? How far is it a caricature? Do the millions form their opinions
from the cartoons and comments of the newspapers? Or have they some
deep instinct which enables them to discern the real character and
worth of their public men?
Undoubtedly when politicians, or statesmen as they like to be called,
have been long on the stage, their fellow-countrymen have a pretty
shrewd idea of their quality and value. About new people suddenly
lifted by the Press or the Caucus, or both, to national prominence,
the average man or woman (we always have to say 'or woman' now they
have the vote) may easily be misled and is rightly distrustful. That
is why our vast electorate, like its smaller predecessors, likes to be
governed by well-known personalities or even by well-known names. They
like to act upon an impression of a man gathered, shall we say, across
a quarter of a century. They feel that on such a survey, taking the
rough with the smooth, they can form a clear like or dislike, a
definite agreement or opposition.
It would be wrong to think of Mr Snowden as the spiteful, vindictive
death's head of his caricatures, as a sworn tormentor who used the
Rack, the Thumbscrew and the Little Ease of taxation with gusto upon
his victims. He was really a tender-hearted man, who would not have
hurt a gnat unless his party and the Treasury told him to do so, and
then only with compunction. Philip Snowden was a remarkable figure of
our time. He was among the chief architects of the Labour-Socialist
Party. He was the first and so far the only Socialist Chancellor of
the Exchequer. He played a decisive part in the political convulsion
which hurled the Socialists from power in 1931 and inaugurated the
National Government regime twice acclaimed by enormous majorities.
For nearly forty years Philip Snowden steadily and consistently built
up the Socialist Party. He faced all its misfortunes, swallowed and
reproduced most of its follies; and he held an indisputable right to
share its years of prosperity. The first quality that the British
nation approved in Philip Snowden was that they knew where he stood.
He was no more a doctrinaire Socialist than Ramsay MacDonald, but he
revolted from Socialism at a different angle. MacDonald liked the Tory
atmosphere and tradition; the glamour of old England appealed to him.
Snowden viewed the Socialist creed with the blister ing intellectual
contempt of the old Gladstonian Radical. To him Toryism was a physical
annoyance, and militant Socialism a disease brought on by bad
conditions or contagion, like rickets or mange. His heart was filled
with an equal measure of disgust and pity when he contemplated the
true-blue Conservative or the green-eyed Socialist.
There are few survivors now. Gladstonian Radicals are a very arrogant
brood. To begin with they are quite sure they know all about
everything. For them the world might have much to do, but it had
nothing to know after the days of Queen Victoria. Adam Smith and John
Stuart Mill wrote it all out quite plainly, Cobden, Bright, and with
some backsliding due, as they opine, to his bad early environment, Mr
Gladstone, expressed it with admirable eloquence. The solitary new
teacher whom they will admit very suspiciously to their mental
parlours is Mr Henry George -- (not Mr Lloyd George by any manner of
means!). Henry George with his Land Taxation impinged roughly upon the
Victorian Radicals, There was a leak, it seemed, in the diving-bell in
which they dwelt. It was an undoubted leak. It might be deplored, but
it had to be faced; otherwise not a chink, crack or crevice had been
opened in their system of thought by half a century of shock and
change.
Snowden's rigidity of doctrine was otherwise impenetrable. Free
imports, no matter what the foreigner may do to us; the Gold Standard,
no matter how short we run of gold; austere repayment of debt, no
matter how we have to borrow the money; high progressive direct
taxation, even if it brings creative energies to a standstill; the
'Free breakfast-table,' even if it is entirely supplied from outside
the British jurisdiction! Their one weakness, their one indulgence,
their one relish - the exceptional taxation of the value of the land,
which, as has been often mentioned, 'God gave to the people'. For the
rest, resistance to all wars, even the most inevitable, and dour, cold
aversion from all imperial possessions and assets, even those from
which large numbers of cottage homes gain the employment which gives
them their daily bread. As for those who cannot understand or will not
believe these doctrines, it were better for them that a millstone
were bound about their neck and that they were cast out into the
Primrose League or into the Independent Labour Party.
We must imagine with what joy Mr Snowden was welcomed at the Treasury
by the permanent officials. All British Chancellors of the Exchequer
have yielded themselves, some spontaneously, some unconsciously, some
reluctantly, to that compulsive intellectual atmosphere. But here was
the High Priest entering the sanctuary. The Treasury mind and the
Snowden mind embraced each other with the fervour of two
long-separated kindred lizards and the reign of joy began. Unhappily,
a lot of things cropped up which were very tiresome. First of all the
Chancellor of the Exchequer had to go on pretending he was a
Socialist, the wordy champion of the class war and so on. This was
awkward when a 'statesmanlike' speech had to be made to the Bankers,
of an appeal made to the public to buy Saving Certificates. Then the
finances had been left in such a shocking state by that profligate Mr
Churchill that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer in his difficulties
had to adopt just the same kind of devices he had blamed so harshly in
his predecessor. Economy, too, was very baffling when the Tories had
kept the military services at the minimum, and all the Socialists put
their trust in the Dole as the last hope of Party salvation. Upon
these incongruities there is no need to dwell.
I have, of course, no sympathy with the cause which Snowden
championed. The destruction of Liberalism by the Labour movement and
the ranging of the less contented and less prosperous millions of our
countrymen under the foreign and fallacious standards of Socialism has
been a disaster to the British people, the consequences of which are
only gradually becoming apparent. It has been attended with a decline
in the progress of democracy, with a marked discrediting of universal
suffrage, and with the decay of the parliamentary institutions by
which the liberties of England were won. A crudeness and dullness has
been brought into the discussion of every question which can already
be sharply contrasted with the tenseness of Victorian debates, and the
strict control then exerted by the House of Commons over the
Executive.
The promulgation by great organized parties of a programme of
nationalizing all the means of production, distribution and exchange,
coupled with the cosmopolitan, anti-patriotic mood, has produced in
Europe violent reactions towards the extremes of nationalism and the
tyrannies of dictatorship. If in our island these results have not yet
become apparent, it is only because Socialists, when they become
Ministers, largely abandon in practice the doctrines and principles by
preaching which they have risen to power. It was undoubtedly a grave
mischief and injury, not only to the working people but to the whole
nation, to found a class party affianced to visionary principles which
could only be translated into action by desperate civil commotion and
the ruin of British freedom and greatness.
After thirty years of faithful, tireless labour in building up this
new party Philip Snowden found himself compelled by public duty to
turn the whole of his vitriolic eloquence and propagandism against his
own creation, and chose to end his political life as a Viscount in the
hereditary Assembly which he had so long laboured to destroy. The
apparent contradiction of spending a lifetime in creating the
Socialist Party and then striking it with unconcealed relish its fatal
blow does not, when all is considered, expose him to any charge of
instability or inconsistency of purpose. All his life he sincerely
hated Toryism, Jingoism, Vested Interests, and what are called 'The
Upper Classes'. On the other hand, he never had the slightest
intention of taking part in any revolutionary movement, nor would he
in any circumstances have become responsible for a state of laxity and
demoralization, financial or political, which would endanger the solid
foundations of the established monarchical, parliamentary and
capitalist system. On the contrary, confronted with the imminence of a
breakdown in the existing order of things and national bankruptcy, he
not only withstood his own friends and colleagues, but fell upon them
with a wholehearted ferocity which astounded the public and delighted
the greater part of it.
A distinction must be drawn between his conduct and that of Mr Ramsay
MacDonald. In the hour of national emergency Snowden quitted and at
the same time almost destroyed the party he had made. But as soon as
the crisis had passed he sought occasion to break with his new allies
and become again the lively exponent of the ideas he had championed
all his life. He did not dream of continuing in his office as a
quasi-Conservative Minister. Whether, if he had been the head of the
Government, he would have acted differently cannot be known. The
pleasures and pomps of Ministerial life, such as they are, the
amenities of elegant and opulent society, made no appeal to him.
Nothing that could be offered by the ruling forces in our Commonwealth
swayed his judgment or his action.
The crisis surmounted, he shook off his new friends with the same
thorough-paced vigour as he had his old. The violence of his
denunciations of the Socialists in 1931 was matched by the terms in
which he upbraided the National Government in 1935. This apparent
catholicity of animosities gave him the appearance of a kind of fierce
dog who would bite anyone and everyone for biting's sake. Actually it
arose from an extreme integrity of personal conviction from which only
a supreme emergency justified a temporary departure. Such a man, had
he been a Spaniard, might have saved Spain the horrors of civil war by
upholding democratic and parliamentary government with an iron hand.
Such a man was the German Socialist Noske who saved Germany from
Communism in 1919. Snowden knew exactly how far he meant to go, and
when pushed beyond that limit reacted with a violence at once salutary
and astonishing.
The story which he has written of his early life" makes us all
not only respect his character, but also admire the free, tolerant
Constitution of England under which he rose from a humble cottage in a
Yorkshire village to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the richest
country in the world and, if that be promotion, a Viscount among its
ancient aristocracy. The tale reveals to us the dignity and
spaciousness of an English cottage home. He displays the riches of
poverty when sustained by strict principles, by religious faith, and
by a keen interest in social evolution. We hear discussions between
his father and his uncle upon predestination, election, and hellfire,
and the decisive summing-up of his mother:
You say that God loves us as we love our own children. Do
you think I would put one of my children into hell-fire? No! not
however bad he'd been.
We see this little row of cottagers, who drew their water from a well
in the adjoining field, rising in physical revolt against the attempt
of the landowner's agent to make a charge for its use. Who can wonder
at the bent given to a child's mind by such a spectacle and such an
experience? Philip was a clever boy and soon top of the village
school. To those to whom his crippled figure was so familiar it is
strange to learn that no one could beat him at running and jumping. He
became a pupil teacher. He passed the prescribed examination for a
lower grade of the Civil Service, and became a 'gauger and surveyor of
Inland Revenue' in the Treasury, of which he was afterwards twice to
be the Ministerial chief.
But it is the third phase of his life which most powerfully commands
sympathy. Hopelessly crippled by an affection of the spine which
followed a slight accident, he was forced to leave the Civil Service.
His father had died. He returned with his mother to his native village
of Ickornshaw, now noted in the Peerage. For ten years he traversed
the length and breadth of the island, as a Socialist lecturer and
agitator. To say that these were years of struggle against poverty
would be altogether to misconceive their quality. Philip Snowden
vanquished poverty from the outset by the simple process of reducing
his own wants to so rigorous a compass that upon thirty shillings a
week, which was all that he would take for his lectures, he was able
to pursue a great world issue and lead a life of proud independence.
He was a preaching friar with no Superior to obey but his intellect.
In this latter day period, when riches count so much and the fear of
poverty haunts so many, there are moral lessons of the highest value
for all classes in this modest account.
I first met him many years ago when I was a young Liberal Minister
and he one of the small band of Independent Labour men who
nevertheless found themselves forced to conform to the main policy of
the Asquith Government. We travelled for four hours together to
Lancashire. Then, for the first time, I saw beneath this apparently
bitter and even spiteful spirit and regard something of the appeal and
kindliness of his nature. His face, though in a way twisted by pain,
ill-health and the mood of revolt, was lighted by a smile truly
disarming, comprehending and delightful. Afterwards it fell to my lot
for seven years to wrangle with him about finance as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, or in opposition to his Chancellorship, and we hit each
other as hard as we could within the wide rules of Order. But never
have I had any feelings towards him which destroyed the impression
that he was a generous, true-hearted man.
The Marxian aberration never obsessed his keen intelligence. One who
knew him well said to me, 'No one will ever know what a Labour
Government will be like till they see one without Snowden at the
Exchequer.' Arrived at the post, he confronted his colleagues with a
resistance to wild and sloppy extravagance, however popular, which
staggered them. Although overborne on many points, he continued to
fight for what he regarded as the essential principles of sound
finance, and the friction of this conflict roused him to the fury and
even hatred with which he eventually assailed his friends and
colleagues.
The British democracy should be proud of Philip Snowden. He was a man
capable of maintaining the structure of Society while at the same time
championing the interests of the masses. His long life of effort,
self-denial and physical affliction was crowned by honourable success.
His fearlessness, his rectitude, his austerity, his sobriety of
judgment, his deep love of Britain and his studiously concealed, but
intense, pride in British greatness, distinguish him as one of the
true worthies of our age. His life of privation, of affliction, of
self-discipline, of wartime odium, had a grand culmination. The
history of Parliament will not ignore the scene when the House of
Commons rose to their feet in enthusiasm as he recited the famous
lines:
All our past proclaims the future: Shakespeare's voice
and Nelson's hand, Milton's faith and Wordsworth's trust in this our
chosen and chainless land,
Bear us witness .. .
Come the world against her, England yet shall stand!
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