Academics From England

"You have stood for what is fine in the soul of this country in the greatest months of her history, and my wife and I send you our heartiest and most thankful congratulations that you are now to bring back fineness and sanity to the councils of this heaving time."

"Asquith was also Victorian in his habitual insistence that the methods of a great government should be beyond reproach: rebels and revolutionaries might break the rules, that was in their programme; authority must accept the disadvantage of never lowering its standard. I have seldom seen him so moved with indignation as he was over the Black and Tans in Ireland in the ‘time of troubles’. The Irish extremists were using murder as a political weapon and had imported men of a criminal type to serve them; the Lloyd George Government retorted by sending notorious ‘hard-nuts’ from the army and giving unusual licence. Perhaps the post-war electorate could excuse such methods; to Asquith they seemed an impossible degradation."

"His mental powers were of the highest order. An astounding memory enabled him to acquire knowledge without difficulty, and a critical spirit let him put it to the best uses. He had a strong Yorkshire constitution; he himself said that it was ‘equally compounded of iron and leather’. I never saw him overstrained; and, until his last years, do not remember his ever being ill."

"Asquith's will became visibly flabbier, tardier and more flaccid under the strain of the War. Then came the personal tragedy which shattered his nerve. The death of his brilliant son, Raymond, came upon him with stunning effect, and he visibly reeled under the blow. It came at a time when he needed all the calm poise and firmness of mind which man can command. For a crisis had arisen where statesmanship had to intervene, decide and direct. It was a misfortune for Britain that the great statesman who had the supreme responsibility was less equal to his task than he had ever been in the whole course of his distinguished career."

"In all the appreciations written after his death his ‘impersonal’ attitude was made a subject of comment, but amid all the praise lavished upon him there was frequently a suggestion that his master faculties were perhaps, after all, those of the judge or possibly the historian or scholar. That he was extraordinarily impartial, that he was a scholar and would have made an admirable historian was clear to all, but that he was a scholar, or historian, pitchforked into active life is, I believe, an utterly false reading of him. I knew him during twelve years, and for a considerable part of them I was on terms of affectionate familiarity with him, though never on those of intimacy. This was, at any rate, sufficient to enable me to form a positive opinion about his nature, and my conclusion was that the caste of his intellect and imagination was essentially that of a man of action."

"His drawback as a leader during times of frenzied anxiety was a concomitant of his two strongest points: his immunity from the contagion of excitement, and his instinct to think things over by himself. There is a passage in one of his later letters in which he says there are three kinds of men: those who can think when they are by themselves—they are the salt of the earth—those who can only think when they are writing and talking, and those who cannot think at all—they, of course, are the majority. He was a man who did his thinking alone. To talk while he was still making up his mind was repugnant to him. In war, when the urgency of this or that measure is vividly brought home to those in immediate contact with one aspect and everybody is seething with projects and suggestions, self-withdrawn composure is apt to be exasperating, and the habit of postponing discussion to undermine a nervous confidence. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his article on Lord Oxford, gave an example of the surprise it was to find, after imagining that Lord Oxford had dismissed some urgent matter from his mind, that he had all the time thought it over and reached a conclusion upon it. Conversation did not help him, but when he met others in council they found that he was prepared."

"I recollect Lord Morley once saying to me: “Asquith ought to have been a judge. He would have made a great one. I remember,” he said, “a conversation I had recently with Arthur Acland about early days when Acland, Asquith and I used to meet together often to discuss politics, and I said what a pleasant fellow he was. Acland replied, ‘Yes, but did you ever hear him make any suggestion of his own?’ I had to confess that although he discussed every proposition advanced by others with great intelligence and force, he never submitted any ideas of his own for our consideration.” Asquith undoubtedly had not only the mind, but the temperament of a judge."

"He gave dignified but not rousing and vigorous leadership to the nation. But a War Minister must also have vision, imagination and initiative—he must show untiring assiduity, must exercise constant oversight and supervision of every sphere of war activity, must possess driving force to energise this activity, must be in continuous consultation with experts, official and unofficial, as to the best means of utilising the resources of the country in conjunction with Allies for the achievement of victory. If to this can be added a flair for conducting a great fight, then you have an ideal War Minister. Mr. Asquith at his best did not answer sufficiently to this description to make him a successful Chief Minister in a war which demanded all these qualities strained to the utmost. But apart from these shortcomings the nerve of the Prime Minister at this time was clearly giving out, and he gave the impression of a man who was overwhelmed, distracted and enfeebled not merely by the weight, but by the variety and complexity of his burdens. Whether he was ever fitted for the position of a War Minister in the greatest struggle in the history of the world may be open to doubt, but that he was quite unfitted at this juncture to undertake so supreme a task was not open to any question or challenge on the part of anyone who came constantly in contact with him at the time."

"A strenuous education in the classics had given him an effortless command of language. I do not believe that he ever wrote, or spoke, a slipshod sentence in his life. His reading ranged wide; but he had a useful word, possibly of his own coining, to describe certain books as ‘skipworthy’. Perhaps his temperament left him a little insensitive to the arts, other than literature. Music was not merely distasteful to him; it caused him real discomfort. His philosophy and his statesmanship—his whole cast of mind—were matter-of-fact rather than imaginative. His virtues were those of commonsense and efficiency. He was a Roman rather than a Greek. His mind had a massive momentum that carried him along, with others behind him, and broke through obstacles. However arduous or exasperating the conditions, he always kept his composure. But he had in him an element of disdain—of contempt for the underhand and base. I do not recall ever seeing him angry, but I often knew him scornful. In the course of his public life he suffered many disappointments and defeats. He faced them with a Roman stoicism; and when I look for terms to describe the qualities that were notable above all others in his character, I can find them only in words that come to us from the Latin—magnanimity and equanimity."

"His reluctance, in private as well as public, to discuss what was not yet clear to him seems to me to be the manifestation of a fundamental characteristic—one which I personally admire more than any other—a perfect integrity of mind. The foundation of his character was the adamant stone of intellectual integrity. It made magnanimity natural to him for, est animi exiguique Ultio (Revenge is the joy of a starved and puny soul). It made it easy for him to put aside personal considerations when the interests either of the nation or his party were concerned. At such junctures the soul of his honour was at stake, and I do not believe that the historian will discover one instance in his long career in which he risked it."

"He won't fight the Germans but he will fight for Office."

"I always regretted then, as I regret now, that I never knew Asquith... Although party feelings were strained in those pre-war years and he necessarily stood out as the principal actor to most of what party loyalty impelled us to condemn, I never listened to him making a speech without being greatly impressed by the strength of the qualities that he could command. Complete mastery of his case, and perfect choice of language appropriate to its deployment before an intelligent and critical audience, went with what looked like an equally complete indifference, once his decision had been taken, to the opposition that might be aroused. However unwillingly, such qualities extorted admiration from his most bitter opponents. But whether because of this sort of feeling or in spite of it, he always remained for me a figure aloof, alarming and unapproachable."

"The Liberals whom Asquith led formed one of the most talented administrations in British history, dominated in 1914 by such figures as Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty; Richard Haldane, a former reforming war minister, now Lord Chancellor. The prime minister himself was a survivor of an earlier era, old enough to have seen, as a boy of twelve in 1864, the bodies of five murderers dangling from the gallows outside Newgate, their heads concealed by white hoods. A lawyer of modest middle-class origins, 'a Roman reserve was always natural to Asquith,' in the words of his biographer. He fought against any expression of his stronger feelings.' George Dangerfield went further, asserting that Asquith lacked imagination and compassion; that, for all his high intelligence, he failed convincingly to address any of the great crises which overtook Britain during his years of office 'He was ingenious but not subtle, he could improvise quite brilliantly on somebody else's theme, He was moderately imperialist, moderately progressive, moderately humorous, and being the most fastidious of Liberal politicians, only moderately evasive.' If this judgment was cynical, it was plain that by August 1914 Asquith was a tired old man."

"If the British Empire was viewed around the world as rich and powerful, the Asquith government was seen as chronically weak. It was conspicuously failing to quell violent industrial action or the Ulster madness. It seemed unable effectively to address even the suffragette movement, whose clamorous campaign for votes for women had become deafening. Militants were smashing windows all over London; using acid to burn slogans on golf club greens; hunger-striking in prison. In June 1913 Emily Davison was killed after being struck by the King's horse in Derby. In the first seven months of 1914, 107 buildings were set on fire by suffragettes. Asquith's critics ignored an obvious point: no man could have contained or suppressed the huge social and political forces shaking Britain. George Dangerfield wrote: 'Very few prime ministers in history have been afflicted by so many plagues and in so short a space of time.' The prominent Irish Home Ruler John Dillon wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: 'the country is menaced with revolution.' Domestic strife made a powerful impression on opinion abroad: a great democracy was seen to be sinking into decadence and decay. Britain's allies, France and Russia, were dismayed. Its prospective enemies, notably in Germany, found it hard to imagine that a country convulsed in such a fashion - with even its little army riven by fraction - could threaten their continental power and ambitions."

"He was a man of sound judgment who lacked the flame—heavenly or demonic—of genius."

"In my first year in the House of Commons, Mr. Asquith was leader of the Liberal Party and I give him pride of place among the parliamentary debaters of that time. His speeches were models of lucidity and brevity, with the English language at its best. In an age when prolixity was already becoming a substitute for conviction, he never wasted a word."

"It was not merely as administrator, but as parliamentarian, that office exalted him. Strong in argument, but weak in imagination, his terse Latinized oratory had never in itself the magic which compels attention. But when there was attention already (as for an important minister there must be), its exceptional precision and concision told on men's ears and minds with monumental effect. From the first to the last year of his premiership he was the giant of the commons' debates. In cabinet he conceived his role as the chairmanship of a board, whose members it was his business to hold together by genial tact and judicious compromises. He was not the devotee of causes or ideals; he rarely looked far ahead; his concern was to carry on the king’s government from day to day."

"From the beginning he meant to be Prime Minister, sooner or later. For this position nature had endowed him to a great extent, but not completely. He had as fine an intellectual apparatus, in the way of grasp and understanding, as I ever saw in any man. In his earlier political days he was a very serious person. I remember once passing along the Horse Guards with him. He touched my arm and pointed to the figure of John Bright walking in front of us. ‘There,’ he said, ‘is the only man in public life who has risen to eminence without being corrupted by London Society.’"

"Asquith drunk can make a better speech than any one of us, sober."

"A fierce, resolute Asquith, fighting with all his powers would have conquered easily. But the whole trouble arose from the fact that there was no fierce resolute A. to win this war or any other."

"The impression of Mr. Asquith that remains with me is of a man of great dignity, somewhat aloof and Olympian. He belonged to the Victorian age. He would have thought it ill-bred to discuss current politics at the dinner-table, or to criticise other politicians. The guests who were staying in his house, especially those who claimed to know him best, would tell you what he was thinking, but his own conversation never gave a clue. I have an entry in my diary for June 25th 1916, when I was staying at The Wharf: "They say the Prime Minister is worried about having made Lloyd George Secretary of State for War. He thinks it is the mistake of his life." Perhaps it was."

"A jovial bon-vivant, fond of the ladies, especially the young and pretty ones, he is partial to cheerful society and good cooking; and his zest for enjoyment is shared by his wife. Formerly a well-known barrister with a large income, and for a number of years in Parliament, then a Minister under Mr. Gladstone, a pacifist like his friend Grey, and favouring an understanding with Germany, he treated all questions with the cheery calm and assurance of an experienced man of business, whose good health and excellent nerves were steeled by devotion to the game of golf."

"He had no vision, no power or desire of prevision, no ounce of drive in his composition, not a spark of initiative, no power of leadership of any sort or kind. He gave the Cabinet no lead; he never bound our work together; Cabinets were mere wastes of time; he was the worst chairman I ever sat under at any committee; he kept no sort of order at Cabinet councils nor even attempted to bring us to a decision; he hardly ever expressed any opinion himself. The desire on all occasions to avoid a decision was an absolute disease with him. That the Cabinet was always too late in everything it did, the supply of munitions, the reconstitution of the General Staff, the supply of men, the supply of food, was his fault."

"The present Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, represents a type of public speaking carried to higher perfection than by anyone else in modern times. Possessed of a copious vocabulary, an extraordinary and effortless command of the right word, a remarkable gift of lucidity and compression, and a resonant voice, he produces an overpowering effect of Parliamentary and forensic strength. Whether in exposition or declamation, in opening or in reply, on a great subject or a small, he never falls below a certain stately level, even though he never soars above it into passion or kindles an audience into flame."

"He was not at all distressed at being the leader of an almost non-existent party. As long as he could conduct amorous correspondence with his lady friends, Asquith was content. He remained complacent to the end. This had always been his great fault and also his great virtue."

"Where another speaker would stretch himself out over an hour and a quarter, Mr. Asquith has said all that is to be said in fifty minutes. It is a miracle of succinctness, the apotheosis of business-like efficiency. There is no gesticulation, no self-abandonment, no flash or glow, but the case is stated, illustrated, argued, and proven with a force that is almost stunning. Further, the Prime Minister is the master of one incomparable art—the result, I imagine, of early practice at the Bar. He can represent the weakest of cases as though it were of overwhelming strength, the most startling of innovations as though it were an everyday procedure, the most disputable of propositions as though it were an axiom of universal acceptance. This combination of gifts, intellectual, personal, rhetorical, renders Mr. Asquith a Parliamentary workman of the highest order."

"It was not Mr. Asquith's judgement that I distrusted; it was that of the kind of barnacles, especially in the general staff, which had affixed themselves to his administration. I believed with good reason as the event showed, that Mr. Lloyd George's military opinions were better than those of Sir William Robertson and the War Office, and that the united command and all else was impossible unless the generals could be put under proper control by the Secretary of State for War and the Prime Minister. That was the real struggle and I regretted the dénouement as much as did the present Prime Minister. But we feel that we were battling for the National existence."

"Mr. Asquith is hard to describe, because within his own limited sphere, the management of Parliament in quiet times, he was perfection, and he was a failure because outside those limitations, and yet within his own range of time, lay a world of battle, murder, and sudden death—and that time called for men of a different range of genius. And more than most politicians of our period Asquith looked to the past, always to the present, and seldom to the future."

"What could not be retrieved was Asquith's own way of looking at a world at war. This proved fatal. His complete detachment from the spirit of the struggle; his instability of purpose; his refusal to make up his mind on grave and urgent issues of policy; his balancing of one adviser against another till the net result was nil; his fundamental desire to have a peaceful tenure of office in the midst of war, could in the long run have only one result. The men who were in tune with the atmosphere of war—the bold, the eager, the decisive spirits—first fell away from him and then combined against him."

"My father relied on argument rather than invective, but he was, on the whole, an exception to the general rule of those days."

"The socialization or nationalization of production and distribution and the extinction of what is called Capitalism—by whatever name the ideal, and the process for its attainment, is called—would starve the resources, and, in time, drain away the life-blood of the great productive industries which depend for their efficiency on the free play of initiative and enterprise. And Labour is becoming more and more a class organization, an expression and embodiment of what is called “class-consciousness.” That again was significantly illustrated in the general strike, which was directed by organized Labour, and which was countenanced—it is true, in a somewhat shamefaced fashion—by the Parliamentary Labour Party leaders."

"What is the use of talking of Empire if here, at its very centre, there is always to be found a mass of people stunted in education, prey to intemperance, huddled and congested beyond the possibility of realising in any true sense either social or domestic life"

"To me personally he was always most friendly—very easy of access, with a marvellous memory and a loyalty to his colleagues which it is impossible to over-praise. But as the chief of a War Cabinet he was not quite in his element. He was an excellent chairman, quick to understand any point raised, unfailingly courteous to all his colleagues, but apparently regarding it as no part of his duty to initiate solutions of any difficulty or to make suggestions for a new departure in policy. The result was that Cabinet discussions under him were models of propriety and decorum but a little wanting in that liveliness and resource necessary to cope with the prodigious difficulties with which we faced."

"His resolutions were grounded on careful thought, and once made they were sturdily maintained: he was not easily diverted from his path either by political bluff or by real menace, and beneath his mellowness was a strong foundation, a massive base of tempered reason, difficult to shake or assail. He was very human, but he was so remote from frenzy that he did not always understand the full force of its grip on others; when passions were roused, he was sometimes inclined to overestimate the effect of the broad rational principles which governed his own actions."

"They are confronted in Ireland with a situation which is largely due to their own lack of insight and of sympathy, confronted with a situation which needed strong and firm handling, strong and firm, but at the same time and above all, just, even-handed, and dispassionate. They have let loose this orgy of reprisals which confuse the innocent and the guilty in a common tumult of lawless violence. They deny, they prevaricate, they cloak and screen and block the avenues to truth in a childish belief that when order has been restored, a cowed and subjugated people will spread out grateful hands to grasp the boon of pinchbeck Home Rule. I say deliberately that never in the lifetime of the oldest among us has Great Britain sunk so low in the moral scale of nations. That, at any rate, when most of the members of the Coalition are forgotten, will be an achievement which will be remembered in history."

"The Income Tax at 6s., 5s., 4s. 6d.—I go further, and say, even at 4s.—is, in my opinion, a bad and pernicious form of capital levy... The effect of such an Income Tax...is not merely to curtail the enjoyments and comforts of a large number of our middle classes. Its effect is to dry up the stream which fertilises the whole field of employment and of industry. I should have thought that no class of the community is more directly interested in a reduction of the Income Tax to—I will not say the pre-War standard, for that is out of sight now, and an utter impossibility—but to a reasonable and moderate standard, than those people who gain their living by the work of their hands. It is not a class question at all. It affects the interests of the whole business world and the whole future of British trade."

"More important still, perhaps, the sanctity of treaties and of the public law of Europe has been finally vindicated; and last, and most important of all, we have set up in the League of Nations a new international polity which promises, if it is given free scope and full authority, first to bring about progressive disarmament, and next to provide in future a rational and humane substitute for the ruinous arbitrament of war."

"Everyone desires outrages to cease, and its perpetrators, from whatever camp they proceed, to be detected and punished. (Hear, hear.) But this cannot be too clearly said—it is possible for the State to pay too high a price for what is called the vindication of the law. The price is too high, far too high, when it involves the enthronement in the seat of justice of revenge, and the borrowing by the Executive of the criminals' own methods of indiscriminate robbery, arson, and murder. (Cheers.)"

"[I]f a Labour Government is ever to be tried in this country, as it will be, sooner or later, it could hardly be tried under safer conditions."

"It is said, however, that this is not an ordinary case of the transfer of power from one party to another. It means, for the first time, the installation of a Socialist Government in the seats of the mighty. Few people who have not had the melancholy privilege of reading my postbag for the last month will realise what this prospect means to a large and by no means negligible mass of our fellow subjects. I have had a very large experience of the vagaries of postal correspondence. I have never come across more virulent manifestations of an epidemic of political hysteria... I have been in turn, during these weeks, cajoled, wheedled, almost caressed, taunted, threatened, brow-beaten, and all but blackmailed to step in as the "saviour of society.""

"The military domination of Prussia, with all that it involved to the fortunes of the secular struggle between force upon the one side and right upon the other, that domination has been once and for all and for ever overthrown."

"As Prime Minister, Asquith had his faults. His training had been that of a barrister, whose business it is to support the case in his brief by all fair means. That is not enough for a Prime Minister, particularly in war-time. He must be prepared to originate policy and insist on its adoption. Nor are the issues so clear as they are in legal proceedings. Decisions have to be made not as to what was right in the past, but rather as to what is likely to happen and what ought to happen in the future. That means the adoption of definite plans and their energetic support, even if at first their success seems doubtful. In the qualities needed for action of that kind, Asquith was deficient. No one could better weigh arguments submitted to him or had more extensive and accurate knowledge of the facts of any problem. As Chairman of the Cabinet, or any other committee, he was excellent. It was in what may be called instinctive leadership—the faculty of being right and of forcing through his views—that he did not succeed so well. I remember Bonar Law saying to me of Lloyd George that he was a difficult man to oppose. I don't think I should ever have said that of Asquith. But I should have said that he was an almost perfect man to serve. His loyalty, his straightforwardness, his power of reasoning and his astonishingly accurate memory, together with his gift for clear and forcible expression, made him a delightful chief, an admirable administrator and a notable Parliamentarian."

"Peace we all desire. Peace can only come—peace, I mean, that is worth the name and that satisfies the definition of the word—peace will only come on terms that atonement is made for past wrongs, that the weak and downtrodden are restored, that the faith of treaties is observed, and that the sovereignty of public law is securely enthroned over the nations of the world."

"Is Germany prepared not only to evacuate Belgium, not only to make full reparation for the colossal mischief and damage which have accompanied her devastating occupation of the country, and her practical enslavement, so far as she can carry it out, of large portions of the population...but to restore to Belgium not the pretence of liberty, but complete and unfettered and absolute independence?"

"Finance: The War Debt"

"[T]his long and sombre procession of cruelty and suffering, lighted up as it is by deathless examples of heroism and chivalry, cannot be allowed to end in some patched-up, precarious, dishonouring compromise, masquerading under the name of Peace. No one desires to prolong for a single unnecessary day the tragic spectacle of bloodshed and destruction, but we owe it to those who have given their lives for us, the flower of our youth, the hope and promise of our future, that their supreme sacrifice shall not have been in vain. The ends of the Allies are well known; they have been frequently and precisely stated. They are not selfish ends, they are not vindictive ends, but they require that there shall be adequate reparation for the past and adequate security for the future. On their achievement we in this country honestly believe depends the best hopes of humanity."

"We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all, that she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression; until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation; and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed."

"In dealing with an opponent who has openly repudiated all the restraints, both of law and of humanity, we are not going to allow our efforts to be strangled in a network of juridical niceties. We do not intend to put into operation any measures which we do not think to be effective, and I need not say we shall carefully avoid any measures which violate the rules either of humanity or of honesty. Subject to those two conditions I say to our enemy—I say it on behalf of the Government, and I hope on behalf of the House of Commons—that under existing conditions there is no form of economic pressure to which we do not consider ourselves entitled to resort."

"Excerpts from a Leader's speech delivered in Manchester in 1918"

"[T]hree of the most important resolutions, namely, those relating to the Most-Favoured-Nation treatment, protection against dumping or unfair competition, and the adoption of measures to render the Allies independent of enemy countries as regards essential industries, were proposed by the British delegates and passed at the Conference in the form in which they were put forward."