Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As a result, members of the bar have been, until very recently, almost entirely from the well-to-do classes. Since judges are appointed exclusively from barristers with from seven to fifteen years of experience, the judicial system has also been monopolized by the upper classes. In 1926, 139 out of 181 judges were graduates of expensive “public” schools. The same conditions also exist on the lower levels of justice where the justice of the peace, an unpaid official for whom no legal training was required, was the chief figure. These justices of the peace have always been offshoots of the “county families” of well-to-do persons.

With a system of legal administration and justice such as this, the process of obtaining justice has been complex, slow and, above all, expensive. As a result, only the fairly well-to-do can defend their rights in a civil suit and, if the less well-to-do go to court at all, they find themselves in an atmosphere completely dominated by members of the upper classes. Accordingly, the ordinary Englishman (over 90 percent of the total) avoid all litigation even when he has right on his side.

As a result of the conditions just described, the political history of Britain in the twentieth century has been a long struggle for equality. This struggle has appeared in various forms: as an effort to extend educational opportunities, as an effort to extend health and economic security to the lower classes, as an effort to open the upper ranks of the civil services and the defense forces, as well as the House of Commons itself, to those classes which lacked the advantages in leisure and training provided by wealth.

In this struggle for equality the goal has been sought by leveling the upper classes down as well as by leveling the lower classes up. The privileges of the former have been curtailed, especially by taxation and more impersonal methods of recruitment to office, at the same time that the opportunities of the latter have been extended by widening educational advantages and by the practice of granting a living payment for services rendered. In this struggle, revolutionary changes have been made by the Liberal and Conservative parties as well as by the Labour Party, each hoping to be rewarded by the gratitude of the masses of the people at the polls.

Until 1915 the movement toward equality was generally supported by the Liberals and resisted by the Conservatives, although this alignment was not invariable. Since 1923 the movement toward equality has generally been supported by Labour and resisted by the Conservatives. Here, again, the alignment has not been invariable. Both before and after World War I there have been very progressive Conservatives and very reactionary Liberals or Labourites. Moreover, since 1924 the two major parties have, as already mentioned, come to represent two opposing vested economic interests—the interests of entrenched wealth and of entrenched unionism. This has resulted in making the positions of the two parties considerably more antithetical than they were in the period before 1915 when both major parties represented the same segment of society. Moreover, since 1923, as the alienation of the two parties on the political scene has become steadily wider, there has arisen a tendency for each to take on the form of an exploiting group in regard to the great middle class of consumers and unorganized workers.

In the two decades, 1925-1945, it seemed that the efforts of men like Lord Melchett and others would create a situation where monopolized industry and unionized labor would cooperate on a program of restricted output, high wages, high prices, and social protection of both profits and employment to the jeopardy of all economic progress and to the injury of the middle and professional classes who were not members of the phalanxed ranks of cartelized industry and unionized labor. Although this program did succeed to the point where much of Britain’s industrial plant was obsolescent, inefficient, and inadequate, this trend was partly ended by the influence of the war but chiefly by the victory of the Labour Party in the election of 1945.

As a result of this victory, the Labour Party began an assault on certain segments of heavy industry in order to nationalize them, and initiated a program of socialized public services (like public medicine, subsidized low food prices, and so on) which broke the tacit understanding with monopolized industry and began to distribute the benefits of the socialized economy outside the ranks of trade-union members to other members of the lower and lower middle classes. The result was to create a new society of privilege which from some points of view looked like an inversion of the society of privilege of 1900. The new privileged were the trade-union elite of the working classes and the older privileged of the upper classes, while the exploited were the middle class of white-collar and professional workers who did not have the unionized strength of the one or the invested wealth of the other.

Political History to 1939

The domestic political history of Britain in the twentieth century could well be divided into three parts by the two great wars with their experience of coalition or “national” government.

In the first period ten years of Conservative government (in which Salisbury was succeeded by Balfour) were followed by ten years of Liberal government (in which Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Asquith). The dates of these four governments are as follows:

A. Conservative

1. Lord Salisbury, 1895-1902

2. Arthur J. Balfour, 1902-1905

B. Liberal

Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 1905-1908

Herbert Henry Asquith, 1908-1915

The government of Balfour was really nothing but a continuation of the Salisbury government, but it was a pale imitation. Balfour was far from being the strong personality his uncle was, and he had to face the consequences of the Salisbury government’s mistakes. In addition he had to face the beginnings of all those problems of the twentieth century which had not been dreamed of during the great days of Victoria: problems of imperialist aggressions, of labor agitation, of class animosities, of economic discontents.

The sorry record of the British war administration during the Boer War led to the establishment of a Parliamentary Committee of Investigation under Lord Esher. The report of this group resulted in a whole series of reforms which left Britain far better equipped to stand the shocks of 1914-1918 than she would otherwise have been. Not the least of the consequences of the Committee of Investigation was the creation, in 1904, of the Committee on Imperial Defence. On this latter committee Esher was, for a quarter-century, the chief figure, and as a result of his influence, there emerged from the obscurity of its secretarial staff two able public servants: (Sir) Ernest Swinton, later inventor of the tank, and Maurice (Lord) Hankey, later secretary.at the Peace Conference of 1919 and for twenty years secretary to the Cabinet.

The Balfour government was weakened by several other actions. The decision to import Chinese coolies to work the mines of the Transvaal in 1903 led to widespread charges of reviving slavery. The Education Act of 1902, which sought to extend the availability of secondary education by shifting its control from school boards to local government units and by providing local taxes (rates) to support private, church-controlled schools, was denounced by Nonconformists as a scheme to force them to contribute to support Anglican education. The efforts of Joseph Chamberlain, Balfour’s secretary of state for the colonies, to abandon the traditional policy of “free trade” for a program of tariff reform based on imperial preference succeeded only in splitting the Cabinet, Chamberlain resigning in 1903 in order to agitate for his chosen goal, while the Duke of Devonshire and three other ministers resigned in protest at Balfour’s failure to reject Chamberlain’s proposals completely.