LORD GREYS MEMOIRS

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 45, 17 November 1925, Page 9

LORD GREYS MEMOIRS

THE MAN AND HIS METHODS CRISIS OF 1914 A RECORD TRUE TO TYPE Soma remarks which Lord Grey of Fallodon makes in his opening chapter on the general character of British Foreign Ministers give the key to much that follows in his memoirs (writes the London “Times” reviewer). “Their best qualities,” he observes, “have been negative rather than positive. They would not execute sharp turns or quick changes of front; they were not disposed to make mischief or stir up strife amongst other nations, or to fish in troubled Waters . . . and they have generally shrunk from committing themselves for future contincies, from creating expectations that they might not be able to fulfil, and from saying at any time more than they really meant.” This is a type of Alinister frequently produced by our great political houses, to one of which Lord Grey belongs. Hie family name, as he . reminds us, “was notably associated with the Reform Bill of 1832,” and his grandfather, Sir George Grey, was a trusted member of several Whig Governments in Queen Victoria’s reign. These facts paved the way to his entry into public life in 1885 as Liberal member for the Berwick-on-Tweed Division of Northumberland, which included Alnwick, the district for which his father had sat, and the neighbourhood of his home. It was, ns part of his training in capacity for public service and without any “preconceived ideas of policy” or special predilection for foreign affairs, that he went in 1892 to the Foreign Office as Parliamentary Under-Secretary when Lord Rosebery became Secretary of State. He bad taken office "without any elation,” and left in due course without much regret. Opposition meant liberty to express “individual views.” whether or not the rest of the Liberal Party agreed with them; and it also meant a greater share of that country life which has always been for Lord Grey not a luxury but a positive necessity for his physical and mental well-being. How much it has always meant to him is shown by the detail with which, in a book devoted to the gravest themes, he recalls and revels in the zest of his weekly escape through the still sleeping London streets each Saturday morning during his first years of office tn his Hampshire cottage. It does not offend his idea of the dignity of history to associate a phase of the controversy with Franco over the Nile valley witn the annoyance he was put to of cutting short his week-end among his roses, and ho adds to the long list of Abdul Hamid’s misdeeds that in 1906 he prevented the Foreign Secretary from keeping in the woods the most sacred festival of his year, "Beech Sunday,” that brief moment in Alay when “the beech trees in young leaf give an aspect of light and tender beauty to English country which is well known but indescribable.” This love of trees is perhaps tho only point of contact which Lord Grey has with Bismarck, and it may not bo too fanciful to discern an underlying connection between his joy in the tranauility and happiness of a wood lit by the spring sun and his feelings when he heard, while still out of office, that an Entente with Franco had dispersed the brooding . mistrust that had darkened his first experiences at tho Foreign Office. '

“Tho gloomy clouds were gone, tho sky was clear, and the sun- shone warmly.' 111-will, dislike, hate, whether the object of them be a person or a nation, are a perpetual discomfort; they come between us and all that is beautiful and happy. They put out the sun. If the object lie a nation with whom our interests are in contact they poison tho atmosphere of international affairs. This hod been so between England and France.**

Foreign Secretary. The less idyllic aspect of the situation was sharply brought home to him when, immediately upon his taking over the jxist of Foreign Secretary in the Campbell-Bannerman Government, in the very throes of the general election, he had to face Germany’s attempt to break the new understanding oy forcing M. Delcasse’s retirement and the Alge-, ciras Conference upon France. “The question that preoccupied me most anxiously was how to answer M. Cambon’s request for a promise of military or naval support if Germany forced war upon France. I know we could not give it, but what would be the effect of the refusal on France? Would France say that the promise of diplomatic support, contained in the Anglo-French agreement was worth nothing now without a promise to give help 'in war? Would the French Government go even further, and say that the net result of the Anglo-French agreement had been to make things worse for France than before, to expose her to a menace from Germany, in face of which diplomatic support alone was useless, and then to leave her in the lurch?” “From time io time,” Lord Grey continues, “the same question was raised, but never did we go a hair’s-breadth beyond the position taken in the conversation with Al. Cambon on January 31, 1906.” The “military conversations sanctioned, after consultation with, klie then Prime Minister and Lord Ripon, have since been objected to because, as was disclosed in the “Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,” they were not submitted to the Cabinet for approval. “Aly answer now,” Lord Grey says, “would that I ought to have asked for a Cabinet; in after years, and with more experience, I think there should have been a Cabinet”; but ho insists that no fresh obligation was undertaken in his reply to the French Ambassador. , . . Lord Grey’s narrative of his administration of the Foreign Office in the years that ran between the Algeciras crisis and the outbreak of the Great War is an indirect but striking work of self-portraituie. A tribute is first due, however, to the literary excellence of the narrative. Its lucid phrasing and orderly arrangement, its logical coherence, its scrupulous regard for confidences, and avoidance of the least offence against good taste and friendship go far of themselves to explain the intellectual and moral ascendancy enjoyed by its author towards the end of his term of office. Nor does it make the worse reading for certain flashes allowed to a sense of humour that is on the whole rigidly controlled. One might instance, though it is too elaborate to quote, the account of the German Ambassador’s entanglement in his- “explanations” of the Panthers trip to Agadir. Or there is the quiet remark in summing up the significance of England’s diplomatic action at the same crisis: “Lloyd George, of course, made no speech about having supported France in shining armour.”

The German Peril. When we turn to the more weighty self-disclosures of these chapters, it is evident, first of all, that Lord Grey was very unwilling to believe that the directors of German policy could be as insensitive as they proved to the appeal of fairness and reason. A noteworthy passage in his second volume (chapter XIX) reads like an amende to certain publicists who demanded a more distrustful attitude. “We now know that the line they took sprang from knowledge.” Closely allied Vi this <*enerosity of judgment was the anxious desire to be fair to an adversary s point of view. One curious instance of this is contained in a letter to Campbell-Bannerman in 1906 raising the “possibility of ceding a port to tiCi' many on the west coast of Morocco. Lord Grey had not realised, he confrankly, “that, to mention it to the French would have been fatal td the Entente.” The reader will note in these

volumes a number of instances, some trivial, some mure serious, in which Lord Grey seems to have had difficulty in appreciating th» susceptibilities, as distinct from the rights of friends and allies. It was not lack of loyalty, but the instinct (natural in one of his political traditions) to brush emotion aside a little ruthlessly when cool reason seems opposed to it., Ihe Ambassadors’ Conference .of 1913, with its freedom from “sensation and eclat, was Lord Grev's ideal; he may have had too large a hope in rational discussion as a curb on dynastic and popular passions. . The whole book, with its crystalline sincerity, is a cumulative refutation of the charge that “anti-German sentiment influenced Lord Grey’s policy at any stage of his career. He pays more attention to the suggestion that war might have been averted in 1914 if no had declared at an earlier stage that England would fight by the side of France. His reply is that to do so would have been an indefensible “bluff’ on his part, since he had no guarantee that tho Government would honour such a pledge. There was a strong antiwar party in the Cabinet. “This group included more than ono of the names that camo next after the Prime Alinister in authority and influence with the Liberal Party, inside and outside. It is needless to inquire whether the group included half, or less, or more than half the Cabinet; it was sufficient in number and ; influence to have broken up the Cabinet. I made no attempt to counteract this movement either inside or outside the Government. Ido not remember asking any colleagues to support participation in war. if war came.”

Unanimity Essential. His motive for thus abstaining was the conviction that “if the country went into such a war it must do so wholeheartedly, with feeling and conviction so strong as to compel practical unanimity.” Before the violation of Belgium there was not, he maintains, such unanimity in the country; in consequence he boldly declares: "It must be admitted that if there were not an anti-war group in the Cabinet there ought to have been.” Presumably Lord Grey feels it to be outside the scope of these personal memoirs to do much more than state the fact that no step such as Mr. Lloyd George’s warning to Germany in his Mansion House speech of 1911 could be looked for from the Government in 1914. This indeed it but part of a wider prob, lem left unsolved by Lord Grey’s book. We have, on the one hand, his strong conviction that honour and interest' demanded British intervention on the side of France, apart from the Belgian, obligation. He states . plainly that ho “had contemplated resignation if war came and we declined to stand by France.” In more than one place ho draws out with unanswerable force the consequences to this country of allowing Germany to subjugato the Continent. On the other hand, there is Ins equally immovable conviction that neither at the opening of the 1914 crisis nor in the preceding years was it possible to give a more decided inflexion to British policy. In one passage of powerful eloquence he imagines the "host of Bismarck reproaching his successors’’ in the control of German policy for the insanity of their course, and showing them how by refraining from building a formidable Navy and from invading Belgium they might have lulled the suspicions of England while they crushed her jrotential Continental Allies fl “ Had such a policy been pursued by tiermanv,” Lord Grey continues. I think it not only possible, but almost certain, that British Ministers and British opinion would have reacted to it as" described. The result would have been German predominance and British dependence, but this would not’ have been foreseen in London till too late.” These words are like an echo of “The Dvnasts.” with its doctrine of an ineluctable Necessity that rules the fate of nations. Some readers may not sec the necessity. The substance of Lord Grey’s claim for himself is that he maintained the friendship of France, and Russia through times of great difficulty, and that he helped to bring it about that when England decided for war “the Government and the country were not divided, ns they would have been divided, if an aggressive or pronounced anti-German policy had been adopted and pursued.’’ It was a lino demanding patience, tenacity? and a courage not less real for lacking the spectacular quality. Lord Grey was fully equal to his purpose.