CHAPTER IV
In every tragedy connected with old age, the hardening which is the curse of age appears.
The picture which Mr Burden presented at this moment is the more vivid in my memory from the suddenness with which it was extinguished. I desire to describe him as accurately as I may for the sake of that posterity which must learn, not only what his virtues were, but also in what way, and through what weakness, he failed upon the chief occasion of his life. It is a lesson of the highest moment.
Tall, erect, somewhat pompous, but withal very active in his carriage, he carried all the remains of a strong manhood. Of his face I can only say that it was typical of his class: square with a large firm mouth kept closely shut, and carrying, from long habit, an affectation of purpose and determination which was far from the habitual tenor of his mind. His hair was quite white but abundant; he parted it with care upon the left side, and brushed it up clear from his forehead as befitted his suresense of what was decent in such things. His eyebrows were contracted into a slight mechanical frown, acquired perhaps in the habit of attention, but certainly expressing no anxiety nor even any particular keenness in bargaining. His hands were remarkably steady, his gestures firm and sure. I have heard it said, with a colonial exaggeration, that to see him open his umbrella was to comprehend England from the Reform Bill to Home Rule. The young gentleman who composed this facile epigram, a student with a nasal accent and weak in every organ, was born and bred in Port Elizabeth, to which distant centre of African loyalty he has returned. Let me forget him and continue the description of my friend.
His eyes, of a pale grey, were alight with so singular an honesty as to border upon ignorance of the world. He had perhaps never in his life deceived a human being. His business, founded upon ample capital, demanding no credit, existing as a wholesale resource for the trade and independent of advertisement, never required it of him to lie, to cheat, to gamble, or to destroy another’s wealth. Its expansion had been automatic; if his success had raised in him any evil, it was certainly nothing worse than a slight tincture of pride.
Of his patriotism I fear to speak lest I should destroy by too violent a praise the impression I desire to produce. It was abundant, it was like a perennial spring; it was the deepest thing in the man. I am certain that had England been in danger he would cheerfully have sacrificed his fortune. He had known nothing but his country; his very religion was in some odd way muddled up with her vices, her spirit, and the peculiar beauties of her landscapes, the less obvious effects of her towns. Indeed, he would have died for her ... perhaps in a sense hediddie for her ... his name, manner, and habit of life seemed to me who knew him to be always England, England.
With all this there was a failing, which neither I nor even those who were in more daily intimacy with him, could hope to eradicate. The national life, to which he was so deeply attached, had stood still with him for many years.
Let me not be misunderstood. He had followed with a certain eagerness the development of England and of the Empire. He was an assiduous reader of theDaily Telegraph,The Gleam,The Orb,The Globe,The Times, andThe Meteor; he receivedThe Spectator,The Economist,The Doctrinaireupon every Saturday morning, and occasionally looked at them;and when he went abroad, according to his custom, during the month of August, he was careful to make such arrangements as caused these standard weekly organs of opinion to reach him not later than the following Tuesday.
The mere facts, therefore, he knew. He was gratified, and occasionally enthusiastic, over the expansion of our dominion. He had a grasp of the various stages by which the jealousy of foreign nations had been stilled, and their competition annulled. He had appreciated in latter years the decline of English commerce, the ruin of our agriculture, and the upbuilding of a Greater Britain beyond the seas.
All the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race he had seen as clearly as the humblest clerk; he had received it with as religious an emotion as had the poorest and most vulgar of our electorate.
Nevertheless all this had been for him but a pageant. He had never comprehended the great change in our method of thought which this new fact in the life of the world involved. He was like a man who hears of this or that catastrophe—of this or that triumph, suffers in the catastrophe or glories in the triumph, but suffers and glories as in a thing apart: a thing read or seen upon the stage. He never really got it into his mind thathewas an actor in thedrama; thathe, as a citizen, was making the new world.
It is a paradox, but a paradox ever present in our contemporary life; we owe to it the extreme reluctance with which each new and necessary idea is accepted by a people born, after all, to Empire. It is in our blood.
Did space permit me, I could give many instances of this failing: let me be content with two. Mr Burden had voted honourably and straightforwardly for that small taxation of our food supplies, which was necessary for the consolidation of the Empire. Of the direct effect of that vote he never complained; but he would not or could not connect with his opinion upon this matter, the necessary depreciation which it involved in his investments. Again, he had read and applauded Mr Chamberlain’s great speech just after the Australian Commonwealth cancelled the “loans previous”; he also appreciated that Australia must have new capital, and that, in the actual state of her credit, this capital could only come from Great Britain; yet in the meeting in the Cannon Street Hotel six months later, he had described the reconstruction of the Waga-Murri mine as “un-English.”
Mr Burden’s dissociation from the underlying philosophy of his time went deeper still.He would have maintained, in a kind of abstract way, that the connection between finance and politics was dangerous—it is difficult to say whether he saw that it was necessary. At any rate he dreaded and avoided that necessity. He would have admitted that a Cabinet drawn from the ranks of rich men was a purer and better government than one formed upon the less stable models of democratic nations, but in some vague way he must have thought of their wealth as exclusively territorial, for he would not only have expressed, but would have felt a very genuine horror at hearing that a Cabinet minister had held, or had been given, such and such shares in a company connected with our Imperial development.
When he was asked, as I once asked him, how a man could be rich and yet not mixed up with the principal source of modern wealth in England, he replied with a simple affirmation; he said that any one in office should sell whatever shares he had possessed in such concerns. He refused to follow the logical consequences of his creed.
It was precisely upon this point that a greater mind, a mind more necessary to England, though not perhaps more English, found the principal difficulty of contact. Mr Barnett knew that the M’Korio Delta was a touchstone forthe future of England. I do not pretend that his only motive lay there. His motives were largely economic. But, at anyrate, the fulfilment of his own legitimate ambition demanded that he should persuade English opinion of what the M’Korio Delta was.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, there was not at that time in the city any name whose influence would have a more immediate effect towards converting the investor in W. African securities than that of Mr Burden; and yet every avenue of Mr Burden’s mind was closed to such methods of approach as Mr Barnett comprehended. He could not offer shares, and that sharp imaginative power which would have turned the M’Korio Delta into the great province it must become in the future, he knew that Mr Burden did not and could not possess.
The very circumstances by which Mr Burden came to be the sole arbiter (as it were) of M’Korian trade made Mr Barnett’s advance the more difficult.
Charles Abbott, who by a curious anachronism, remains to this day the chief proprietor of the Abbott Line of steamers, had (and has) about him something of the explosive radicalism which was often to be discovered in the older sort of English officials and business men; the men who helped, in their unconsciousway, to build that which we now direct towards such astounding destinies. Of the New Empire he had a shallow, but a curiously robust disgust. He loved things as he had seen them—as they were: for dreams, for anticipations, he had as profound a contempt as for debt. He had never owed any man a farthing; he had never done business with the future. In feature he was red and a little over-eager; in gestures abrupt and strong; but his violence was balanced by a deep and emphatic voice which possessed a strange power of persuasion, especially over men less hearty than himself.
Such a man had not founded his fleet of ships to deal with “niggers.” He had developed it upon the South American trade. A Government subsidy had persuaded him to touch once a month at the M’Korio. He had travelled there once in person, and had carried away nothing but an added contempt for the policy that could deal with such things. Through this unsympathetic channel had Mr Burden been introduced to the Delta.
Mr Abbott, though ten years Mr Burden’s junior, had been, almost from boyhood, his most intimate friend; it was an intimacy born of perpetual daily association, meals in common, and a long life spent with few other opportunities for expansion than that afforded by eachother’s society. When he had last returned to Europe from a voyage to the Delta he had suggested to Mr Burden—with no great enthusiasm—that there was some little dealing to be had with the aborigines of that marsh, in goods of the sort that Mr Burden handled. Iron rings of a sort known to the trade as “Large Nines,” were in that district not only a rarity but an object of political necessity. Long the symbol of authority upon the heads of the chiefs, they had been manufactured with infinite pains from old ship nails by the natives, or imported at considerable expense from the neighbouring Sultanate of Botu. Our excellent English article, cheaper, more reliable, and more accurately made, soon settled the competition of these rivals. It was impossible, indeed, to accept as currency the valuable slaves which had formerly found their way to the Sultanate; but considerable quantities of ivory were obtainable for many years in exchange for a gross of these goods; and Mr Burden had the advantage not only of securing such a profit as was due to his initiative and skill, but of knowing that indirectly through his efforts, the slave trade had disappeared in a part of Africa where it had seemed inseparable from the soil.
It was not to be expected that this state ofthings should last for ever. Oligarchic as was the nature of M’Korian society, the number of chiefs was limited; and a religious awe forbade the possession by anyone of more than a certain number of these sacred symbols. Moreover, a German firm, secretly subsidised by its government, had so far interfered with the old monopoly as to offer the rings at a price which made it difficult for the original trade to subsist in English hands. But Mr Burden’s profits were soon supplemented from other sources. Guns, of a simple sort, and a kind of sword, were introduced, and (a very remarkable example of the ingenuity of a client in Birmingham) fine chain armour replaced the leathern jackets which the warriors of the protectorate had hitherto worn.
But, though Mr Burden had become the sole importer, though his advice and that of Mr Abbott often controlled the decision of the Government in the local affairs of the M’Korio, and though his name was attached to all the few traditions of the settlement, yet the trade was very small, and, such as it was, it was dwindling. In Mr Burden’s considerable affairs, the total of this petty offshoot did not amount to one-twentieth at the most; it rarely represented a profit of £400—more commonly less than £300 in a year; and, tohis natural compliance in Charles Abbott’s judgment, therefore, was added a business experience which made of the Delta something mean and paltry in his conception.
This contempt of his for the M’Korio was broken down at last by the intervention of Cosmo; but that intervention, necessary as it was in its moment, would not alone have sufficed, though without it nothing would finally have been done.
The ground had first to be prepared for the whole public and for Mr Burden as a part of that public; and the instrument of this preparation was the power which—a full year before he had met Mr Burden’s son—Mr Barnett had begun to exercise over the Press.
There is a kind of rash political indignation which we all come across, and to which some of us are attracted. There are men who hate the successful or the rich, but whose hatred is not quite dishonest, though it is wildly unjust. They see conspiracies upon every side, they scowl at every new fortune, but they do so in good faith, for they are haunted by a nightmare of Cosmopolitan Finance—pitiless, destructive of all national ideals, obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition. I need hardly say that this kind of hatred was roused against Mr Barnett, and gained anespecial strength from the attitude which the great papers took towards what was known to be his scheme; and yet at that moment Mr Barnett, had the world known it, was comparatively poor. He had not certainly a free capital of ten thousand pounds, beyond what was locked up in his various properties and adventures.
The particular charge made against Mr Barnett was that he had “bought the Press”—or at least the London Press.
Of general and vaguer charges there were many, but they are incapable of proof, and I shall not concern myself with them. With his relations towards the Press I am well acquainted; and though it is not my business to defend Mr Barnett, yet I am so convinced that this kind of indignation proceeds solely from an ignorance of our social machinery, that it is incumbent upon me to show quite clearly how false the accusation was.
The men who made it (a salutary fear of the law of libel forbade them as a rule to put it into print), the men who made it, I say, had no other ground than this: they saw that the M’Korio Delta was in the air, they heard the name upon every side; they knew that Mr Barnett would necessarily grow rich upon its development; they saw the Press almost unanimousin its demand for that development, and they jumped to the false conclusion which I have indicated, because their vision had been warped by an uncontrolled and ill-balanced anger against the modern inequalities of fortune.
Mr Barnett had not bought the Press; the Press is not to be bought. That Mr Barnett had an influence with the Press, and a legitimate influence, I will not deny; but when I have described that influence I think my thesis will be proved.
Let us consider first what papers Mr Barnett owned. Here is the list. He was the proprietor ofLittle Ones,Boy’s Chatter,The Woman,The English Country Side. For some months, in the interval between the bankruptcy of Sir Charles Binsted and the formation of the Agricultural Union, he had also owned theFarmer’s Friend. It is incredible that he should have made such purchases with any object of hoodwinking public opinion. He could only have made them as an investment. The very names of the papers are sufficient proof of this.
Beyond these he was proprietor ofThe Review.The Reviewwas a losing property; he had been compelled to assume direction of it in payment of a debt, and he was occupied at the date of which I speak in building it upinto something of its former importance. He was also part owner (but only part owner), of the rivalHolborn Review, and the editor, who had been for some time his private secretary, has assured me that Mr Barnett’s name was hardly mentioned in the office. I am confident that he took no interest whatsoever in theHolborn Review, save as a financial venture. My readers have but to turn to a file to see that arguments upon both sides were admitted to its pages, and that the M’Korio Delta, even at the height of its fame, rarely afforded matter for more than one article in each issue.
Lest I should be accused of concealing anything that might militate against my contention, I will mention the fact that Mr Barnett did own the majority of the shares of the Twentieth Century Syndicate. Now the Twentieth Century Syndicate, it is true, finances the Railton Group; but Mr Barnett himself had nothing to do with that group. It is interested inThe Mercury,The Britisher,The Hammer, and the two evening papers,EnglandandThe Empire. No one who is acquainted with the nature of modern finance can believe for a moment that so indirect a relation would give Mr Barnett the least voice in the management of these sheets.
Whether Mr Barnett held shares in theLondon and General Publishing Company at any one time, it is not easy to determine. These shares fluctuated considerably, and, if one may say so without disrespect to so honoured a name as that of the Duke of Essex, the chairman of the Company, they were something of a gambling stock. They were perpetually changing hands, and the motive of their acquisition, whether by Mr Barnett or by anyone else, cannot have been other than that of a speculative game.
Over the great dailies he had absolutely no control whatsoever. He advertised in them, of course; and a good deal of capital was made by his opponents out of the fact that Mr Jefferson, the owner and editor of so important a sheet asThe Gazette, was connected with Mr Barnett in the old business of the Haymarket Bank; but if that is to be taken as an evidence of corruption, or even of undue influence, who would be safe from such an accusation?[6]A man in his position is naturally acquainted, often intimate, with the leading men of his time. The editor ofThe Doctrinaire—a man wholly above suspicion—wasproud of his intimate friendship; and he naturally had relations as a host upon more than one occasion with the two proprietors ofThe Nation, and with the editors or owners of most of the other great dailies. But Mr Barnett had no monopoly in such acquaintances or friendships; most of our great financiers could have boasted of the same.
It is time that I should turn from the ungrateful task of defending a man against a calumny that ought never to have been made, to describe the real services which Mr Barnett rendered to his adopted country, and to the Empire; nowhere were these services more apparent than in the interest he took in the careers of the more brilliant young journalists. Let me cite the case of Mr Powler.
Mr Powler had been among the first to see the advantages of reversing our fiscal policy. As long ago as 1898, just after taking his degree, he had written a powerful defence of Protection which had earned him his Fellowship. He was poor, and the whole weight of his genius might have been lost for years to England had not Mr Barnett appointed him to the editorship ofThe Review, just before the outbreak of the war in South Africa. No one is ignorant of the effect of that appointment.
THE EDITOR OF “THE DOCTRINAIRE”(AS HE APPEARED READING HIS PAPER—“CAUSES OF OUR SUCCESS IN SOUTH AFRICA,” TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY)
THE EDITOR OF “THE DOCTRINAIRE”(AS HE APPEARED READING HIS PAPER—“CAUSES OF OUR SUCCESS IN SOUTH AFRICA,” TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY)
THE EDITOR OF “THE DOCTRINAIRE”(AS HE APPEARED READING HIS PAPER—“CAUSES OF OUR SUCCESS IN SOUTH AFRICA,” TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY)
Long after the war was over, but a full year before any mention of the M’Korio Delta had been publicly made, the editor ofThe Doctrinaire—a man wholly above suspicion—wrote to Mr Barnett, and asked him if he could recommend some young fellow to sub-edit that great weekly journal during his own enforced absence upon a shooting party in Scotland. I know from Mr Powler himself what passed. Mr Barnett came in person to the office ofThe Review, climbed to the third story (no small sacrifice in a man of his temperament and figure!) and begged Mr Powler to accept the post.
“It is better paid,” he said, “and a bigger place altogether than anything that I could offer you.” Then he added with a smile: “You know the advice that I always give to you young men.”
It was in vain that Mr Powler (so he himself assures me), pleaded to remain in the service of a man whom he could not but regard as the builder of a new world. He knew that Mr Barnett was making a great sacrifice in permitting him to go, and it was only after a generous dispute that the older man had his way.
Mr Powler took with him toThe DoctrinaireMr Heinrich Rallé, and between them they gave a life and a meaning to the paper whichrecalled the great days of John Hardy and the successful, strenuous battle in favour of the unification of Italy in the sixties. When the editor ofThe Doctrinairereturned from Scotland, he found the beginnings of a fortune; and it seems to me not unnatural that he should, under the circumstances, have permitted something of a new policy to appear in his pages, or that he should have been drawn towards Mr Barnett with a sentiment approaching to affection.
Talent of this kind is rare in modern journalism. The proprietors ofThe Nationprivately approached and obtained the services of Mr Henry Rallé. I will not enter into the somewhat heated difference that arose betweenThe DoctrinaireandThe Nationrelative to this matter. I will content myself with saying that Mr Raleigh infused a new life into the latter paper, erased from its outer cover the phrase “an Hebdomadal Journal,” permitted the insertion of illustrations, and in the general tone he imparted to its articles made it what it had never been before; a vigorous ally of all that makes for the larger life of England. It was on this occasion that Mr Barnett’s friendship with Mr Jenkins, a proprietor ofThe Nation, arose; and it is a singular example of his tact and care for detail, that, during the four orfive years which have since elapsed, in all the multitude of dinners that either have eaten under Mr Barnett’s roof, Mr Jenkins and the editor ofThe Doctrinairehave never met.
I will not weary my readers with the story of the founding ofCriticism; of the resuscitation of the oldOrb, or of that vigorous off-shoot of Colonial enterprise, the London edition of theM’Korio Times, It is enough to say that, in all this mass of ephemeral literature, the last journal alone was directly founded by Mr Barnett; and, as it dealt principally with the City, it had but little effect upon the general current of opinion.
All this intellectual movement was instinct with the spirit of England.
There are political forces that seem without form, very vague and viewless as great currents of air may be, but they are as irresistible.
Through England and the English some such force has long been stirring. All these young men had felt it; all were bound as by a kind of fate to express it. It coloured their writing upon every topic. It troubled their view of the future; it compelled them to continual appeals. For long that undefined and natural thing, that impulse of patriotism, had wandered in vagaries, thinking that now here, now there, it had found the substance which itshould inspire, the matter which it was destined to make live. So all great movements begin.
At last, and not long after the advent into English journalism of that younger life and keener enthusiasm which I have just described, a true and permanent object absorbed its energies, and, if one may use the phrase, the nation and her servants had found their mission.
The full meaning of the M’Korio Delta had appeared.
FOOTNOTES:[6]As an example of the lengths to which folly can go, I may quote the accusation made against Mr Barnett that he influenced three of the great dailies upon a critical date bythreatening to cut off their supply of paper!!!
[6]As an example of the lengths to which folly can go, I may quote the accusation made against Mr Barnett that he influenced three of the great dailies upon a critical date bythreatening to cut off their supply of paper!!!
[6]As an example of the lengths to which folly can go, I may quote the accusation made against Mr Barnett that he influenced three of the great dailies upon a critical date bythreatening to cut off their supply of paper!!!