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there. He's got the stuff. Brains looks-voice. No wonder he stands out. And he's got something the other fellows haven't. Personal quality? Vision? I don't know. But there it is. . . . He's seen something big, bigger than himself, and it shines through." He laughed and shook himself. "You see, I'm all het up about the fellow."

I smiled back at him. "Yes," I said. "That's why many people hate him so much and nobody can stop talking about him."

22

For two reasons, this observer's reactions are worth recording. The first, and more important, is that they register the impression which nearly every one gets who encounters MacDonald in action-whether he is seen handling men in committee or conference, acting in an executive capacity, or speaking in any kind of public meeting. He is, by universal admission, a perfect chairman-fair, tolerant, and efficient. He is equally formidable as a fighter on the floor, and has had a wide experience of both rôles. The fighting instinct is indeed so strong that some have doubted his pacifism-even after 1914 as they enjoy the calling out of his resources that occurs when he has his back to the wall. Any one who heard him howled down at a Trade-Union Conference in 1916, and in 1917 saw him turn chill hostility into irresistible enthusiasm, went up to the Labor Party Conference at Liverpool in 1925 with eager anticipations of a "good show." The Left Wing critics had assembled their cohorts; the Communists gathered for a final assault; the nervous disquietude that followed on

1914-as

the 1924 election seemed to provide the ideal atmosphere; the "London Times"-not prone to idle prophecies-declared that MacDonald was in "for the fight of his life" and was obviously hopeful of an issue that would sink him and the Labor party together. MacDonald took the gloves off, and the upshot of the conference was a demonstration of his unchallengeable ascendancy. He is never so dangerous as when he is "up against it." In a crisis, he calls upon his daimon, and it obeys him. Its appearances are incalculable except in so far as they follow this law of necessity.

Some hint of it, however, is almost always there. His speeches are not always good, but he never makes one without giving his hearers something-a turn of phrase opening long vistas of idea-to work like a ferment in their brains when they go home: some line of light that travels in and out among the circumlocutions and the close time of the argument that baffle reporters. They feel power and, over and above it, an odd lifting personal quality.

People who meet MacDonald socially may and often do miss this. For such occasions he has the charm of friendly approachability, a remarkable memory for faces, a quick interest in little things, a somewhat naïve penchant for prolix and unrevealing anecdote, and a general culture that surprises those who expect a Labor leader to be ignorantly crude and flatteringly simple. Finding him agreeable but not dangerous, they are relieved but also disappointed. He has no ambition to seem dangerous: that, for him, belongs to "nursery politics." "Sweet

reasonableness" is his social line. But any one who imagines that this good form of his implies weakness or softness of fiber makes a great mistake. He is on easy and familiar terms with his convictions, and has no need to parade them or typify them in a red tie and hobnailed boots, nor any fear of their being jeopardized by his clothing the external man in the correct garb of ceremonial observance. Nor is this all. MacDonald has the pride and the shyness of the Scot-all the Scot's stingy economy, all his queer secretiveness. Nothing will induce him to wear his heart upon his sleeve, or, to put the same thing in another way, to talk socialism at the dinner-table. It is the same thing; that is the point. His gift, his daimon, the thing he has which other politicians have not got, is a faith which makes him go, which is as much part of him as the blood in his veins, and, as little as that, to be made a show of.

Here is the second reason for welcoming the testimony of direct contact. The quality my American friend sensed is hard to convey by description or analysis. It is the explanation of the extraordinary devotion to MacDonald felt by the rank and file of his own party and, resentfully, in the last resort, by any and every critic in it, of whom there are plenty; of the exasperated hostility with which he is derided by Liberals and Tories, who cannot understand it; and of the bitter and unrelenting campaign directed against him by the communists in Moscow and elsewhere. It made him from 1914 to 1922 the target of an abuse such as no one since Glad

stone has had to meet and, at the same time, defeated every effort in those years to keep him out of the lime-light. It helped to give a special luster to his brief premiership and a sense of catastrophe to his fall.

The one short word we have to indicate the quality is genius; but that overworked expression does not, of itself, tell one much, and helps not at all to particularize the thing MacDonald possesses. Perhaps one can get nearest by a comparison. In personal magnetism, assisted in either case by masculine beauty and a musical voice, as well as in a certain baffling aloofness, maddening to colleagues, in intellectual power and in intellectual limitation, and in oratorical command, there are close resemblances (as well as minor suggestive differences) between Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Gladstone. But there is one remarkable distinction between them. Gladstone, dying in 1895, entirely failed to see that the creative phenomenon of the time, in Europe, and above all in Britain, was the awakening selfconsciousness of the working class and the stirring of a revolt against commercialism that affected all classes. Mr. MacDonald had, by the time he entered his thirties, grasped this fact and equipped himself in relation to it. If it is true of Gladstone, as a modern historian has put it, that "there was no great thing he did or wanted to do," it is not true of MacDonald. A vision of a great thing to be done brought him into politics, has colored all his work, and has been conveyed, by him, to some millions of his fellowcountrymen. The special quality both of his thinking and of his speak

ing derives from their connection with a central idea. No such idea has visited his parliamentary competitors. Discontinuity speaks from voice and action of the most brilliant of them, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill.

24

The dreams of the boy color the life of the man. In his formative In his formative years of poverty in Lossiemouth, young Ramsay MacDonald fed his imagination with the legends, stories, and ballads told him by a remarkable grandmother, learned a fundamental realism and sincerity toward life from a no less remarkable mother, and, in his brief school-days, devoured every book on science on which he could lay his hands. When at eighteen he came up to London he was determined to be a scientist. An illness deflected him; but scientific training gave him, for good and all, his socialist method. He was and remains an evolutionist. For him society is a growth; proceeds by adaptation, not by destruction. Looking at the facts and forces of the nineties, he decided that the period of Liberalism was over and set his hand to building a new party to express the new ideas permeating the minds of then isolated groups and bring them into vital contact with the organized trade-unions. Those who were there know that it was in the main to the determination, energy, and patience of its young secretary that the creation of the Labor party in 1900 was due; know too that but for MacDonald the first victories of the new party at the 1906 election would have been impossible.

He created a new party. More, he gave that party not only a pro

gram but a philosophy. The British Labor party is socialist; since 1918, when its constitution was amended. to include "workers by hand and brain," broadly socialist; since 1925, when a new program of action based on "avowedly Socialist principles" was indorsed, specifically so. The socialism of the British Labor party is evolutionary, scientific, and democratic. MacDonald has been the main force in making and keeping it so. His has been the guiding brain in the party ever since 1894, when Keir Hardie hailed the new recruit as its "greatest intellectual asset.' Then he brought with him a connected and coherent social philosophy, which has been deepened and enriched by experience but not essentially changed. The views set out in "Socialism and Society" (1908) or "Socialism and Government" (1909) are the views of "Socialism: Critical and Constructive" (1921); they are the views he has impressed on the mind of his party. He has suffered for his consistency, and the party has profited by his suffering. Thus, believing as he did in reason and coöperation as the instruments of social and national development, he was a pacifist before 1914 and in 1914 stood on his position. He could, in the fatal JulyAugust days, have entered the war government. He refused and, instead, went out into the wilderness. He held a section of the party stanch and at the same time held it back from self-righteous sectarianism; in 1918, thanks to him, it was possible to close the divided ranks of British Labor and resist the communist wave that split every socialist party on the Continent. He fought communism

as he had fought militarism in Britain with argument and logic-above all with a positive socialist philosophy -and beat it. More than that, he was able to hold British Labor true to the internationalism taught it by the pacifist section, with the result that to-day the Labor party is in the unique position of never having seen red about Russia, either for or against.

This consistent belief of his in coöperation and consent is the key to his success as a foreign minister. It was an even more important asset than his unique knowledge of foreign countries and conditions. Discussion of the achievements of Britain's first Labor government is frequently wide of the mark because the premises are not truly stated. The government was, from the start, in a one-to-three minority. It was let in by Liberals and Tories who believed that Europe would break it. MacDonald assumed office because no socialist can refuse service, with a perfectly clear conception of what could and should be done. At the Albert Hall in January, 1924, he said, "We believe we can give peace to Europe." He knew, as every one did who thought about it, that until peace was given to Europe there was no constructive thing anywhere that could be begun. The ground had to be cleared off. His own realism was complete. He knew too that he could do it, and how. In office he used the weapons, and only the weapons, he had consistently advocated out of it-coöperation, good-will, frankness, and friendliness. He did not talk of the British army and navy; he relied on idealism, and it worked, as it will, when single-mind

edly pursued. Nine times out of ten the idealist excommunicates himself because, at the test of action, his mind pays tribute to the materialist illusion. MacDonald's did not. He knew his facts, and he knew in what he believed. The London settlement ended the period of war mentality and started that of coöperation. Locarno is a partial fruit of the new method; the Geneva Protocol would have been a more complete one. When he had reconciled France and Germany, MacDonald turned to Russia. Idealism again, if you will. There was and is much in Russia he did not like, but "Russia exists." Europe is a family; its members have got to live together. "We are not to be our own judges, here or hereafter." The Russian treaties were an essential part of his peace policy. When the Liberals allied themselves with the Tories against the treaties, they made the general election of 1924 inevitable; when they entered into a pact with the Tories, they made its result inevitable. Inevitable, but not permanent. The great Tory majority of November, 1924, is already visibly breaking up. Every by-election since has registered the rising tide of Labor sympathy.

22

In the biography of his wife published in 1911, Ramsay MacDonald told the world as much as he desired any one to know of his private life. The book is a literary phenomenon in many ways and in none more so than in its obliteration of the personality of the author. It is a picture of Margaret Ethel MacDonald, not of her husband. What it tells us about him is, in the main, the curious fact that it was, and is, as natural to him

to speak to the world as it is unnatural to speak to any individual. Parsimonious in the small change of affection to the living, he can overflow with generous appreciation of the dead. Death moves something primitive in him, for here again he is a Scot and walks near the great mysteries and simplicities, achieves poetry in his prose when he writes or speaks of them. Moreover death, apart from ceremonial aspects which appeal to him, is the great separator, the great revealer of individuality.

MacDonald is a singularly definite individual himself; perhaps for that reason he is little interested in or aware of the individualities of others. He has no talent for intimacy, and lacks, as a leader, the trick of creating individual attachment to himself, though he possesses in high degree the power of creating group attachment. People complain that he is hard to talk to; and most of his difficulties, as premier, were due to a misplaced and childish secretiveness about small things. For instance, he mentioned to no one that an old friend had given him a motor-car, though, had he done so at the time, every one would have been glad to know that an overworked and underpaid public servant (a British prime minister gets £3500 a year after income tax has been deducted) had been secured this measure of relief. Nor did he tell any one that, when he went out of office, he gave up both the car and its endowment. This mystery-mongering of his is the more irritating since, in all larger matters, his honesty and sincerity are transparent. He has nothing to conceal. Scandal has never touched him. In more than thirty years of public life,

no one has ever found any failure of loyalty with which to accuse him. His record proves him immune to ordinary temptations of ambition.

The critics on his hearth fulminate, in the main, against his patience, and the fact that the trumpet has never been his instrument. He does not believe that the walls of Capitalism will topple at its breath. Dazzled by the goal, they are impatient of the road, and annoyed by his insistence that "the space between the 'is' and the 'isto-be' has got to be traveled." The rise of the party has been so rapid that they understate the solidity and strength of the resistance to it presented by habit, the actual organization of society, and the fears which their own ill considered, illogical, and ill tempered vociferations excite. Between his cautious reasonableness with its tender respect for tradition and romantic delight in beauty of form, and their impassioned unreasonableness, there is a constant internal warfare. It constitutes his major obstacle in the task of converting opinion.

No one knows that better than he. The life of no leader of a progressive party is a bed of roses; his pillow is adequately enough stuffed with thorns to satisfy the bitterest of his opponents or the most captious of his friends. Presumably he finds consolation in the fact, which acts as the final exasperation of his critics, that they know, even better than he knows, that the future of Labor in Britain is as closely tied up with him as its past has been. He made Labor government possible in 1924; he makes it possible, even probable, in 1928 or 1929.

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