MR. ASQUITH: A CRUCIAL TEST.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 90, 15 April 1908, Page 6

MR. ASQUITH: A CRUCIAL TEST.

(By " Sigma," in the London Daily Mail.)

The present session, a critical one for everybody, is crucial for Mr Asquith. Three of the Government's most anxious Bills are in his keeping—the Licensing Bill, the Old Age Pensions Bill, and the Budget. Mr M'Kenna and Mr Birrell will have to look out for squalls, but Mr Asquith faces the certainty, of a tornado. His place for the next few months will be in the thickest of the fight, giving and receiving the hardest of blows.

' But we know pretty well already what Mr Asquith is capable of in the tough and tumble of Parliamentary warfare. It- is not because it will give us Ins measure as a gladiator that this session is a turning-point, in his-^career. It is because it will pre-eminently test him as a statesman and a leader. The House, his party, and the country will watch him with a constant eye to a future which may be near, and which is in any case assured. They will seek for indications of what Mr Asquith will do like as Prime Minister, as Leader of the House, and as leader of the party. (

For it is nothing less than that, the supreme among all the visible rewards of a political .life, that now awaits him. Already he is the Prime Minister's alter ego and his predestined successor. Already he speaks, as it. were, from the thrsehold of No. 10, Downing Street. The Premier's precarious health, which men of ail parties unite in deploring, and his many enforced absences from the House, which are a loss to all who cherish the urbanities of politics, throw upon nis chief lieutenant a burden and an authority that increase from day to day. Men listen to Mr Asquith, and judge Him less

for. what he is than for what lie will shortly, be. It is not the Chancellor of the Exchequer that engages their attention, but the Premier in embryo. For no one doubts that when the vacancy occurs Mr Asquith. will fill, it; Within his own party he has no rival. Mr Morley is a statesman, but not a politician." He would be a Prime Minister in Utopia, but not in England. Sir Edward Grey, whom very few men know, but all men instinctively trust, has restricted himself to a single sphere of politics, the importance of which is out of all proportion to the interest people take in it. Mr Lloyd-George's turn has not yet come. Mr Haldane, who pos-; sesses perhaps the profoundest intellect now devoted to the service of the State, is : regarded by the nation rather as a mind than as a man. There is no one else. , - Everything therefore points to Mr/ Asquith as The inevitable Premier of the future. He alone unites the range, the abilities, and the kind of hold upon the people that are the essential qualifications for the highest office of all. Whether he has aiso the gifts of personality and of temperament that are not less essential to successful leadership, whether he is skilled in the vital arts of managing men and can inspire that warmth Jof feeling which is. worth infinitely more to a party chief than mere admiration for his talents, whether he possesses or can acouire anything of " G-B's" emollient mellowness and his remarkable knack \ of. smoothing things out, are precisely the points on which the present session will throw a decisive light.. I do not know Mr Asquith; I have never exchanged a word with him; but I have heard and read a great many of his speeches, I have watched his career pretty closely from the time he was introduced into public life.- as one of Mr Gladstones' discoveries, I have studied him at close range in the, House, and I know what the average man in the lobbies, Who js quite surprisingly like the average man out of them, says and thinks of him. The real Mr Asquith may therefore be very different from my outside estimate of him—one sees inevitably only the worst side of a public man in public. But such as it is, it is at least unprejudiced and independent. < Few members of the. Libertl Party relish, the prospect of the change from «C-B' 'to Mr Asquith. The Labour men may almost be said to resent it. There is a free recognition of his qualities of a first-class fighting man, who is always supremely sure of himself, who is never below the top of his form, who can bring all his guns into action at a moent's notice, who will stand up to anyone, and whom very few can stand against. Nor, of course, does anyone question the validity of his success or the high and genuine character ,of his abilities. He has made liis way, everyone agrees, altogether on his merits, by his own exertions, and without any adventitious and whatever. The misgivings relate, solely to the personality of the man. He is not popular with the rank and file. I have known him to succeed by a speech of pitiless, piled-up lucidity and compactness,in lashing his party into an enthusiasm such as even Mr j Gladstone could not always evoke. But the enthusiasm was /wholly intelectual; the cheers were for the achievement not for the man. Lord Rosebery has gone bail for it that Mr Asquith has qualities of heart even more remarkable than his qualities of head ; The average man remains unconvinced. He knows all about Mr Asquith's head, and he would like to know all about Mr Asquith's heart.

His great complaint, indeed, is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will not let him.

His is not, I should judge, an expansive nature, or, if it is, his colleagues in the House are not allowed to catch it in its more glowing and genial moments. His political manner is not ingratiating. It is even a libtle stilted. There is about him a warning air that fools will not be suffered gladly. Men accuse him of the superiority which is commonly associated -\yith Oxford. They suspect that his inclination is to treat stupidity ■as a sort of crime. His alert and energetic bearing is the expression, it is said, of a, disposition that is fundamentally . self-centred and not- .without its spice of intellecmU. arrogance. The spoken words betrays the man even more than the written one. Mr Asquith's speeches have many admirable qualities. They are pungent, vigorous, clear-cut,' concise. They are as good as any public speaking can.be that is not oratory. Their defect is their lack of tone and colour. A certain bloodless rigidity of excellence runs through them. The speaker, you feel, knows almost too well what he is going to say and just how he is going to say it. He will not for a moment be carried out of himself. "The magic hand of chance" had no share in the composition ,of these ordered, resonant periods. The vibrant voice, so confident and full, the abrupt, dramatic gesture, just fail to convince one, that the speaker fully feels the passion, he is declaiming; You might miss the touch that fuses, eievates, and transmutes the whole. I never hear Mr Asquith without being more satsified than ever that he is incapable of an indiscretion. t

It seems, therefore, the destiny of the party of all ihe enthusiasms to be • led once more by the man with none. Ms Asquith will ont find the situation an easy one. The Labour Members regard him as precisely £he kind of Liberal they most wish to get vid of, nor nave they yet either forgotten or forgiven Featherstone. It is not insignificant that the suffragettes, honour him with a quite distinctive hatred. But Mr Asquith has one supreme asset on his side, an illimitable confidence in himself. And so far he has never failed to justify it. Apart from Balliol and the Bar, he did for the Home Office what Mr Chamberlain did for the Colonial, and what Mr Lloyd-George is doing for the Board of Trade. A Prime Minister, however, is not so much an administrator as a diplomatist, and'in the Ayork of diplomacy Mr Asquith is still untried.