scheme for immediate Home Rule with particular privileges of representation for Ulster. But both the extreme Unionists and the extreme Nationalists presented minority reports which showed that no real settlement had been reached. At this juncture the controversy was raised to a new pitch by Lloyd George's proposal to introduce Home Rule and conscription simultaneously. A conscription bill was actually passed by the House of Commons. But the opposition, not only of Irishmen of all groups, but of the majority of the premier's own party, was so bitter that volunteering was substituted for conscription. Matters fell back into their former status, and the fate of Home Rule became as uncertain as before. It is widely felt that the Government of Ireland Act as passed in 1914 will never be put into effect. But it is reasonably certain that the essential purposes of it will be realized without much delay when international peace shall have been restored.

SELECTED REFERENCES

A. L. Lowell, The Government of England (New York, 1909), I, Chaps. xxiv-xxxi, II, Chaps. xxxii-xxxvii ; Ibid., Public Opinion and Popular Government (New York, 1913), Chaps. v-viii; Low, Governance of England (new ed., New York, 1914), Chap. vii; T. E. May, Constitutional History of England, continued by F. Holland (London, New York, 1912); C. J. H. Hayes, British Social Politics (Boston, 1913), Chap. ix; Ibid., Political and Social History of Modern Europe (New York, 1916), Chap. xxii; S. Low and S. C. Sanders, Political History of England, 1837-1901 (London, 1907); J. A. R. Marriott, England since Waterloo (London, 1913); M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, 2 vols. (London, 1902); A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (2d ed., London, 1914); H. Belloc and G. Chesterton, The Party System (London, 1911); H. Cecil, Conservatism (London, 1912); L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London, 1911); W. L. Blease, Short History of English Liberalism (London, 1913); R. S. Watson, The National Liberal Federation (London, 1907); W. S. Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem (London, 1909); E. Childers, The Framework of Home Rule (London, 1911); E. Barker, Ireland in the Last Fifty Years (London, 1917); F. H. O'Donnell, History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 2 vols. (London, 1910).

CHAPTER XV

POLITICAL PARTIES: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ISSUES

I. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS

Tariff and Taxation. The general economic and social reconstruction which will follow the return of peace will be of engrossing interest; and without doubt many great party issues

some new, some merely in new guises will arise out of it. For present purposes it must suffice to call attention to a halfdozen great economic and social questions, which were at the same time party questions, in the years preceding the war. Of economic questions, three were perhaps of chief importance: tariff reform, including colonial preference; taxation; and land reform. The tariff question arose out of a reaction which set in among the Unionists fifteen or twenty years ago against the prevailing system of free trade. Protective tariffs were long ago abolished, by a series of measures dating from the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1842-1849, and carried mainly by the Liberal party. Some interests which stood longest by the protective principle never really underwent a change of heart; and toward the close of the last century the decline in agricultural prices and in industrial profits - coupled with the solitariness of the position which Great Britain as a free-trade nation was compelled to occupy suggested to many people that the free-trade system ought to be abandoned. In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, a leading member of the Unionist cabinet, came out for a new tariff system, with two main features: (1) duties on imported foodstuffs, so arranged as to give the products of the British colonies an advantage in rates over those of foreign countries, and (2) duties on imported manufactures to protect British industries against the "unfair competition" of foreign industries. The plan attracted wide attention. Chamberlain resigned in order to give his entire time to advocating his proposals before

the country. A Tariff Reform League was organized, and an unofficial Tariff Commission was set to work gathering statistics and preparing reports. The Unionist party was rent asunder on the question, and naturally the Liberals, who assumed with eagerness the rôle of defenders of England's "sacred principle" of free trade, made much capital out of the situation. Indeed it greatly helped them recover power in 1905. Thenceforward until 1914 the question steadily increased in importance as a political issue. The mass of Unionists were gradually won over, and the proposals were fully incorporated into the program of the party; the Liberals stood steadily by free trade; and at the outbreak of the Great War the nation seemed to be permanently, and not very unevenly, divided upon the issue. Since accepting the plan as a party tenet the Unionists had never been in power; but the presumption was that if raised to office they would incorporate in their first budget the fundamentals of their new or, more accurately, their revived - faith.

It has been remarked by a leading writer that the Unionist party is perhaps chiefly to be distinguished from its leading rival by its benevolent attitude toward certain great interests, of which one is the large landholders. To defray the costs of army reorganization, naval construction, old age pensions, public education, and other great enterprises, vast increases of revenue long ago became imperative. The general fact was recognized by both parties, but upon the mode of obtaining the additional money they were sharply disagreed. The Unionist idea was to tax imports, thereby obtaining revenue while also protecting English agriculture and industry. The Liberal idea was rather to employ income taxes rising in rate as the income grew larger, to make new valuations of land and impose increased taxes upon these values (especially upon unearned increments), and to lay heavy imposts upon inheritances, as well as on motor cars, spirits, and other luxuries in short, to throw the tax-burden, in far greater measure than hitherto, upon the rich, and especially upon the landlords. This was the purport of the famous Lloyd George budget of 1909; and it was on that account that the Unionist House of Lords refused to pass the finance bill until after its proposals had been submitted to the electorate. In 1 Lowell, The Government of England, II, 120.

1

successive budgets to 1914 the Liberal ideas were carried out extensively, although not completely; and at the outbreak of the war the parties were as far apart as ever upon the justice and expediency of what had been done. The Unionists still looked to customs duties as a more desirable source of revenue.

Other Economic and Social Questions. A closely related question which was on the point of becoming an important party issue when the war relegated it to temporary obscurity is that of land reform. The land situation in recent decades has presented many unsatisfactory features: only about twelve per cent of the arable acreage is cultivated by owners; most of the remainder, together with a vast amount of undeveloped land, belongs to rich landlords, who often own whole villages; over sixty per cent of the adult agricultural laborers a few years ago were receiving less that 18s. ($4.50) a week; in a half-century the rural population has declined by more than a half-million; though formerly self-sufficing, the country on the eve of the war was producing not more than one-ninth of the wheat consumed within its borders. To the problem thus raised, two principal solutions have been proposed. The Unionist idea has been, in the main, to stimulate agriculture and raise rural wages by protective duties on imported foodstuffs. The Liberal plan has been rather to reach this end by direct and drastic reconstruction of the conditions of land ownership and of rural employment. A Small Holdings and Allotments Act, passed in 1907, made a beginning by enabling thrifty persons to acquire and gradually pay for small tracts of ground. Plans announced by Lloyd George in the winter of 1913-1914 were much more ambitious. They looked to the creation of a ministry of lands, with a large staff of agents to protect the interests of the farm laborer; they involved the reclamation of waste or unused land and the rapid extension of small holdings; and they laid fresh emphasis on accurate valuation as a requisite to equitable taxation. The war cut short a spirited discussion of this great program; but the problem is one of the most serious that England will have to face in coming years. Whenever taken up again, it is likely to become a political issue, since the landholding interests are closely identified with the Unionist party.

The land problem has, of course, extremely important social

bearings; and the attention given it is but one of numberless illustrations of the tendency in recent times to emphasize issues relating to social legislation and reform. From 1905 to 1914 the Liberals used their power mainly to improve the condition of the common man to protect him against disease, overwork, poverty, unemployment, and accident; to enable him to join more freely with his fellows in trade-unions and other societies; to make better provision for the education of his children; to transfer from his shoulders to those of the rich a considerable share of the burden of public taxation. During these years the Unionists, although differing widely from the governing party upon the nature and methods of such reforms, professed to be no less devoted to the same general end. The Labor party (to be described presently) existed for no other purpose than the promotion of legislation on social and industrial subjects. Among social questions that once stirred sharp party controversy and are certain to come up again are the disestablishment of the Church and the discontinuance of aid from public taxes to schools controlled by sectarian, rather than public, authorities. The Established Church is a bulwark of the Unionist party, while the Non-Conformists, or Dissenters - Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, etc. are to be found mainly in the Liberal ranks. Hence the Unionists opposed a great education bill of 1906, which would have left without public support thousands of schools under Established Church control, and brought about its defeat in the House of Lords. Similarly, they opposed a measure for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, although in this case the Government was able in 1914, by taking advantage of the Parliament Act, to attain its object.

II. LABOR IN POLITICS

Trade-Unionism and Socialism.-It remains to tell something of the origins, nature, and purposes of a minor, but rapidly growing party the party of organized labor. As constituted to-day, the Labor party is a product of the twin forces of trade-unionism and socialism. The one, it may be said broadly, has supplied the organization and the funds; the other, the energy and the spirit. Trade-unions, as every one knows, are organizations of