and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.
This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think politics was a
great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.
They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted
also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable
manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great
constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of
hounding on the solar system.
So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of
the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my
review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
developed a series of hits and anecdotes and-what shall I call
them?-"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated me
on the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of
the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to
fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-
witted person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the
vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.
I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food
dearer for the agricultural labourer. I began to speak of Mr.
Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a
man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still
criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.
And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr.
John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I
fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high
gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and
readier applause.
One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one
must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road
nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets
there," I said, "then it is one begins."
But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache
and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and
wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great
political ideals. Why should political work always rot down to
personalities and personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose,
to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from
personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities
they return. All our social and political effort, all of it, is
like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation. The
broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and
irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the
marshals must begin the work over again!
My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines,
and there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no
place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element
of the population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic
Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking
in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some
special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each
special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the
distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible
silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us
declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and
one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he
will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and
stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine
how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting
indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I
realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I
brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold
at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go
into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against
the late Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my
first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute
and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her
strength. Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked
curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies. I felt she had
no business to be so sure of me. I had moments of vivid resentment
at being thus marched towards Parliament.