human
Thank God! my duty as a citizen is done when I've paid my taxes! Bertrand Oakleigh exclaimed one night at the House.
gpt
I'm glad I'm not a farmer, I'm glad I'm not mixed up with industry. I should be unpatriotic if I didn't double my output of foodstuffs and unpatriotic if I kept one potential piece of cannon-fodder to grow 'em; I'm a pro-German if I manufacture for export to keep up the foreign exchanges--Victory _versus_ Trade!--and Lord knows what I am if I don't cheerfully pay taxes on a business I've had to close down. If I lose money, nobody sympathises; if I make any, I'm called a profiteer, and someone takes it away from me.... Curious how a phrase or an abusive nickname dispenses the people of this country from using such wits as a niggardly Providence has given them! You've only to whisper something about a 'hidden hand,' and a crowded meeting of City men will sit and hypnotise themselves into thinking that there's an active service of secret agents--with poor Haldane as Director General--quietly penetrating our social life and paralysing our efforts in the war. Hidden hand! Pacifist--they can't even throw their absurdities into decent English! Profiteer! We're so astonishingly petty as a nation! I wonder if the same thing's being reproduced in all other countries--the old '_Nous sommes trahis_' nonsense.... They're all governments of old men, too,--and they're tired--and no one outside knows what they've had to go through--and everybody's nerves are snapping. I'm sometimes surprised that these fellows have lasted so long, but I think their days are numbered. If you throw your mind back, you'll remember a phase when Asquith's worst political enemies said he was indispensable, the only Prime Minister, the one man who could hold the Government and the country together. You don't hear that now; we've outgrown that phase. Now people are openly saying that he's not master in his own house, that we shall never win the war so long as he's in the saddle, that they'll turn him out the moment they can find someone to put in his place.... Lloyd-George would be in power to-day, if his friends in Fleet Street could be sure that he wouldn't hanky-panky with the Army.... To read the papers, you'd think it was the cumulative effect of reverses like Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, the shortage of food, and the fact that we've done nothing to increase our home production, and our failure to grapple with submarines. It's deeper and blinder than that.... It's because the Government _hasn't won the war_ that it will fail; and any new Prime Minister will fall in exactly the same way, unless he can win it. Results! results! That mountebank Grayle is quite right; he represents average, unthinking, third-rate, violent opinion, and that opinion's becoming articulate. As I've told you before, I don't think a change will do any good, because we set ourselves too big a task, we started on too high a moral plane. I suppose I should be called a '_pacifist_' if I suggested that that phase was over and that we'd better moderate our tone before we're compelled to.
human
Wait and See; there would be a secession the moment that a better alternative government had been sketched out; you had only to call a Unionist party meeting and put it to 'em straight. But you didn't want to take an unnecessary toss, you couldn't afford to supply powder and shot to rags like the
gpt
Daily News,
human
Nothing's settled yet, he told me after considering academically the offices for which we were both fitted.
gpt
But you know the constitutional theory; you're not justified in upsetting a government unless you're prepared to go to Buckingham Palace and take on the job of forming a new administration. Excuse me! I want to have a word with Oakleigh.
human
Grayle went away with a flea in his ear, he grunted.
gpt
He's been worrying me so long that I had to stop it once and for all. God knows, I don't care about this ministry; I shouldn't have much faith in any ministry formed out of the present House--the best talent's already on the Treasury Bench--and I don't believe in bringing in your superman from outside--the House of Commons can't be learned in a night, and even a government department needs study. What I object to in Grayle is his picking on _me_ as one of his fifty or sixty new allies; you can picture him buzzing round with his fellow-conspirators--'Shall we try Oakleigh and Stornaway? They're solid, moderate, old members--highly respected. They don't add anything to the common stock, of course, but they carry more weight than the men who are always talking and playing an active part. We might try them, their names would look well on the prospectus--inspire confidence, you know.' He chuckled maliciously.
human
I suppose I'm getting very old, but I can't stand young men's conceit in the way I once did. Grayle's like a boy just down from Oxford, doing everything for the first time and imagining that no one's ever done it before. Does he _really_ think this is the first political intrigue in history? I recommended him a course of Disraeli's novels--to improve his technique. Good God! I was playing this game of detaching wobblers and handing out offices that were not in my gift and mobilising the solid, moderate, highly respected old members under _Gladstone_! I toiled and schemed to keep the Liberal Party out of Rosebery's hands; I was making new parties and pigeon-holing possible cabinets all through the Morley-Harcourt days, I was intriguing to keep C.-B. in command when the Liberal Leaguers intrigued to kick him into the Lords. I've been through it all; and be hanged if I didn't do it better than Grayle!