He did so, and the car succeeded. Then he went to his employers, and said: "I am worth three thousand dollars a year."
They did not think so, and he left, to go into business on his own account. A manufacturer staked him at the start. Later, through a friend, some Wall Street capital was interested. Such was the start of J.D. Maxwell, whose interests to-day are merged in a company with a capitalization of sixteen million dollars.
A curly haired Vermont machinery salesman, who had sweated at the lathe, became factory manager for a Detroit automobile-maker. His genius for production and organization made him the wonder and the admiration of the automobile world. He was making others rich. "If I can do this for others, why can't I do it for myself?" he reasoned one day.
With a stake of ninety-five thousand dollars, supplemented with a hundred thousand dollars which he borrowed from some bankers, he built up a business that in twenty months sold for six millions. This was the feat of Walter E. Flanders. I might cite others. The "shoe-strings" became golden bands that bound men to fortune.
All the while the years were speeding on, but not quite so fast as the development of the automobile. The production of ten thousand cars in 1903 had leaped to nearly twenty thousand in 1905. The thirty-thousand mark was passed in 1906. Bankers began to sit up, take notice, and feed finance to this swelling industry, which had emerged from fadhood into the definite, serious proportions of a great national business.
The reign of the inventor-producer became menaced, because men of trained and organized efficiency in other activities joined the ranks of the motor-makers. With them there came a vivifying and broadening influence that had much to do with giving assured permanency to the industry.
But other things had happened which contributed to the stability of the automobile. One was the fact that automobile-selling, from the start, had been on a strictly cash basis. Yet how many people save those in the business, or who have bought cars, know this interesting fact?
No automobile-buyer has credit for a minute, and John D. Rockefeller and the humblest clerk with savings look alike to the seller. It was one constructive result of those early haphazard days. Every car that is shipped has a sight draft attached to the bill of lading, and the consignee can not get his car until he has paid the draft.
Why was the cash idea inaugurated? Simply because there was so much risk in a credit transaction. If a man bought a car on thirty days' time, and had a smash-up the day after he received it, there would be little equity left behind the debt. The owner might well reason that it was the car's fault, and refuse to pay. Besides, the early makers needed money badly. In addition to the cash stipulation, they compelled all the agents to make a good-sized deposit, and these deposits on sales gave more than one struggling manufacturer his first working capital.
Another reason why the business developed so tremendously was that good machines were produced. They had to be good—first, because of the intense rivalry, and then because the motor-buyer became the best informed buyer in the world.
This reveals a striking fact that few people stop to consider. If a man owns a cash-register or an adding-machine, it never occurs to him to wonder how, or of what, it is made. But let him buy an automobile, and ten minutes after it is in his possession he wants to know "what is inside." He is like a boy with his first watch. Hence the automobile-purchaser knows all about his car, and when he buys a second one it is impossible to fool him.
Perhaps the first real test of the stability of the automobile business came with the panic of 1907. It resisted the inroads of depression more than any other industry. Most of the big factories kept full working hours, and the only reason why some others stopped was because of their inability to secure currency for the pay-rolls.
Still another significant thing has happened—more important, perhaps, than all the rest of the changes that have crowded thick and fast upon this leaping industry. It began to be plain that certain features must be present in every first-class car. Hence came the standardization of the mechanism, which is a big step forward.
What is the result to-day? The automobile has become less of a designing proposition and more of a manufacturing proposition; less of an engineering problem and more of a factory problem. The whole, wide throbbing range of the business is bending to one great end—to meet a demand which, up to the present time, has exceeded the supply.
You have only to go to Detroit to see this pulsating drama of production in action. Here beats the heart of the motor world; here a mighty army is evolving a vast industrial epic.
Its banners are the smoke that trails from a hundred soaring stacks; its music is the clang of a thousand forges and the rattle of a maze of machinery.
You feel this quickening life the moment you enter the city, for the tang of its uplift is in the air. There is an automobile for every fifty people in Detroit. The children on the streets know the name, make, and model of nearly all the cars produced. You can stand in front of the Hotel Pontchartrain, in the public square, and see the whole automobile world chug by.
Formerly our cities were motor-mad; now, as in the case of Detroit, they are motor-made. Ten years ago the proudest boast of the Michigan metropolis was that she produced more pills, paint, stoves, and freight-cars than any other American city. The volume of the largest of these industries did not exceed eighteen million dollars a year. To-day she leads the world in automobile production. Her twenty-five factories turn out, in a year, more than ninety thousand cars, or more than sixty per cent, of the total output of the United States. These cars alone would stretch from New York to Boston.
But these figures do not convey any adequate idea of what the motor-car has done for Detroit. You must go to the spot to feel the galvanic and compelling force that the industry projects. The city is like a mining-camp in the days of a fabulous strike. Instead of new mines, there are new factories every day, and the record of this industrial high tide is being made in brick, stone, and mortar. Energy, resource, and ingenuity are being pushed to the last limit to take advantage of the golden opportunity that the overwhelming demand for the automobile has created. It is a thrilling and distinctively American spectacle, and it makes one feel proud and glad to be part of the people who are achieving it.
Some of the new plants have risen almost overnight, and on every hand there are miracles of rapid construction. The business is overshadowing all other activities. A leading merchant of Detroit asked a contractor the other day if he could do some work for him. On receiving a negative reply, he asked the reason, whereupon the man said: "These automobile people keep me so busy that I can't do anything else. I have a year's work ahead now."
A visit to any one of the great automobile factories reveals an inspiring picture of cheerful labor. As you wind through the wildernesses of lathes, hearing a swirling industry singing its iron song of swelling progress, you find enthusiasm blending with organized ability in a marvelous attack on work. Plants with a daily capacity of forty cars turn out sixty. You can behold a complete machine produced every three minutes; you can see the evolution from steel billet to finished car in six days. Formerly it took five months.
While the development of the automobile business is in itself a wonder story, no less amazing is its effect on all the allied industries. On rubber alone it has wrought a revolution.
Ten years ago practically all the rubber that we imported went into boots, shoes, hose, belting, and kindred products, The introduction of rubber tires on horse-drawn vehicles only drew slightly on the supply. To-day more than eighty per cent. of the crude article that reaches our shores goes into automobile tires; and the biggest problem in the whole automobile situation is not a question of steel and output, but a fear that we may not be able to get enough rubber to shoe the expanding host of cars. You have only to look at the change in price to get a hint of the growth of this feature of the business. In 1900 crude rubber sold at sixty-five cents a pound; now it brings about two dollars and fifty cents.
The facts about rubber have a peculiar human interest. When you sit back comfortably in your smooth-running car, you may not realize that the rubber in the tire that stands between you and the jolting of the road was carried on the back of a native for a thousand miles out of the Amazon jungle; that for every twenty pounds of the crude juice brought in from the wilds, one human life has been sacrificed. No crop is garnered with so great a hazard; none takes so merciless a toll.
The natives who gather rubber in the wilds of Brazil, in the Congo, in Ceylon, and elsewhere must combat disease, insects, war, flood, and a hundred hardships. The harvest is slow and costly. Only the planting of vast new areas in Ceylon has prevented what many believe would have been a famine in rubber, and this would have been a serious check to the development of the whole automobile business, for as yet no man has found a substitute for it. In such a substitute, or in a puncture-proof tire, lies one of the unplucked fortunes of the future.
Meanwhile, it has started a speculative mania that almost rivals the tulip excitement in Holland. In London alone hundreds of fortunes have been made by daring plungers in a crude article which only a few years ago was regarded as being absolutely outside the pale of the gambling marketplace.
Closely allied with the rubber end of the trade is the growing demand for sea-island cotton, which is used in the tires. A few years ago we used only fifty thousand yards a year; now we absorb ten million yards, worth seven and one-half millions of dollars.
Now take machinery, and you find that the automobile business has created a whole new phase of this time-tried industry. In many motor-cars there are three thousand parts. In view of the extraordinary demand for cars, the machinery to produce them must be both swift and accurate. The old standard tools and engine lathes were inadequate to perform the service. The automobile-makers had to have new machinery, and have it in a hurry.
This demand came at a heaven-sent moment for the tool-manufacturers. They were staggering under the depression of 1907, and many were tottering toward failure. Here came, almost out of the blue sky, a condition that at once taxed their brains, their resource, and their energy, and at the same time rescued them from bankruptcy.
You have only to go to any of the great factories in Detroit, in Cleveland, in Indianapolis, in Buffalo, in Flint, or elsewhere to see the result of this hurry call for tools and machinery. You find automatics cutting the finest gears by the score, while one man operates a whole battery; you see drills doing from fifteen to twenty operations on a piston or a flywheel; you see an almost human machine making seventeen holes at one time without observation or care.
Through these machines run rivers of oil. From them streams a steady line of parts. The whole scope of the tool business is broadened. In the old days—which means, in the automobile business, about ten years ago—an order for ten turret-lathes was considered large; now the motor-makers order seventy-five at a time by telegraph, and do not regard it as more than part of the day's work.
The whole effect of this revolution in machinery is that time is saved, labor is economized, and it is possible to achieve quantity production. This, in turn, enables the large manufacturer to turn out a good car at a moderate price.
So with steel, where likewise wonders have been wrought. Ten years ago the great mass of the steel output in this country was in structural metal and rails. We had to import our fine alloy and carbon steels from Germany and France. But the automobile-makers had to have the lightest and toughest metal, and they did not want to import it. The result was that our mills began to produce the finer quality to meet all motor needs, and it is now one of the biggest items in the business.
In half a dozen other allied industries you find the same expansion as you saw in rubber, steel, and machinery. For instance, the automobile-makers buy twenty million dollars' worth of leather a year. So great is the demand that a composition substitute was created, which is used on sixty per cent. of the tops. A new industry in colored leather for upholstery has been evolved.
Wood, too, has had the same kind of experience. Whole forest areas in the South have been denuded for hickory for spokes. A few years ago, aluminum was used on ash-trays and exposition souvenirs. Now hundreds of thousands of pounds are employed each year for sheathing and casings on motor-cars.
No essential of the automobile, however, is of more importance than gasoline. Here is the life-blood of the car. It is estimated that there are to-day three hundred thousand cars in the United States that travel fifteen miles a day. There are fifteen miles of travel in each gallon of gasoline. This makes the daily consumption three hundred thousand gallons. At an average price of fourteen cents a gallon, here is an expenditure of forty-two thousand dollars for gasoline each day, or more than fifteen million dollars a year. To this must be added the excess used in cars that work longer and harder, and in the host of taxicabs that are in business almost all the time, which will probably swell the annual expenditure for gasoline well beyond twenty millions.
As in the case of rubber, there is beginning to be some apprehension about the future supply of high-power gasoline, so great is the demand. Many students of this fuel problem believe that before many years there will be substitutes in the shape of alcohol and kerosene. The efficiency of alcohol has been proved in commercial trucks in New York, but its present price is prohibitive for a general automobile fuel. If denatured alcohol can be produced cheaply and on a large scale, it will help to solve the problem.
This brings us to the maker of parts and accessories, who has been termed "the father of the automobile business." Without him, there might be no such industry; for it was he that gave the early makers credit and materials which enabled them to get their machines together.
Ten years ago, the parts were all turned out in the ordinary forge and machine-shops; to-day there are six hundred manufacturers of parts and accessories, and their investment, including plants, is more than a billion dollars. They employ a quarter of a million people.
No one was more surprised at the growth of the automobile business than the parts-makers themselves. A leading Detroit manufacturer summed it up to me as follows:
"Ten years ago I was in the machine-shop business, making gas engines. Along came the demand for automobile parts. I thought it would be a pretty good and profitable specialty for a little while, but I developed my general business so as to have something to fall back on when it ended. To-day my whole plant works night and day to fill automobile orders, and we can't keep up with the demand."
What was looked upon as the tail now wags the whole dog, and is the dog. The volume of business is so large, and the interests concerned so wide, that the manufacturers have their own organization, called the Motor and Accessory Manufacturers. It includes one hundred and eighty makers, whose capitalization is three hundred millions, and whose investment is more than half a billion dollars.
There still remain to be discussed two phases of the automobile which have tremendous significance for the future of the industry—its commercial adaptability and its relation with the farmer and the farm. Let us consider the former first.
No matter in what town you live, something has been delivered at your door by a motor-driven wagon or truck. These vehicles at work to-day are only the forerunners of what many conservative makers believe will be the great body of the business. Here is a field that is as yet practically unscratched. Now that the pleasure-car has practically been standardized, vast energy will be concentrated on the development of the truck. Wherever I went on a recent trip through the automobile-making zone, I found that the manufacturers had been experimenting in this direction, and were laying plans for a big output within the next few years. This year's production will be about five thousand vehicles.
The ability and efficiency of the commercial truck for hard city work are undisputed. It has had its test in New York, where traffic is dense and most difficult to handle. Here, of course, are the ideal conditions for the successful use of the motor-truck—which are a full load, a long haul, and a good road. In a city, a horse vehicle can make only about five miles an hour, while a motor-truck makes twelve miles, and carries three times the load.
Some idea of motor-truck possibilities in New York may be gained when it is stated that there are nearly three hundred thousand licensed carrying vehicles there.
The amount of work to be got out of a motor-truck is astonishing. John Wanamaker, for instance, gets a hundred miles of travel per day out of some of his delivery-wagons. The average five-ton truck, in a ten-hour day, can make eighty miles, and keep constantly at work. On the other hand, a one-horse wagon can scarcely average half that mileage.
Already your doctor whirls around in an automobile, and he can make five times more visits than with a horse. So, too, with the contractor and the builder. The drummer carries his samples in a gasoline runabout, and, in addition to seeing twice the number of customers, he can get their goodwill by taking them for a spin. Fire-engines, hose-wagons, and police patrols race to conflagrations propelled by motors, and get there quicker than ever before.
Just as practically every great American activity ultimately harks back to the soil and has its real root there, so, in a certain sense, may the farmer be regarded as the backbone of the automobile business. We have six million farms, and more than forty-five millions of our population live on the farm, or in communities of less than four thousand people. To these dwellers in the country the automobile has already proved an agency for uplift, progress, and prosperity.
It began as a pleasure-car; now it is a necessity on many farms. In Kansas you can see it hitched up to the alfalfa-stacker; in Illinois and Iowa it is harnessed up to the corn-cutter; in Indiana it runs the dairy machinery. But these are slight compared with the other services it performs for the farmer.
For years the curse of farm life was its isolation. Its workers were removed from the shops, the theaters, the libraries, and good schools. More farm women went insane than any other class. The horses worked in the fields all week, and had to rest on Sunday, so that the farmer could not go to church.
The automobile provided a vehicle not excessive in cost, and able to provide pleasure for the farmer's whole family. It annihilated the distance between town and country. Contact with his coworkers and proximity to the market made the fanner more efficient and prosperous. More than this, the motor-car has made the whole rural life more attractive, and offers the one inducement that will keep the boy on the farm.
A hundred instances could be cited of the automobile's aid to the farm. One will suffice. In times of harvest, when a big gang is at work, the breakdown of a thresher will stop operations for a whole day, if the farmer has to drive to town behind a horse to get needed parts. With an automobile, he can dash in and out in a few hours.
No one expects the automobile to replace the horse on the farm. But for work that the horse can not do efficiently—such as the quick transit of milk, butter, and garden products to the markets—the motor-car has a future of wide utility. Incidentally, the farmer may be the first to solve the fuel problem, for by means of cooperative distilling he could produce denatured alcohol for almost nothing.
The more you go into the study of the automobile on the farm, the bigger becomes its significance. In the United States, four hundred and twenty-five million acres of land are uncultivated, largely on account of their inaccessibility. The motor-car will make them more accessible. Through the wide use of automobiles by the farmer we shall get, in time, that most valuable agency for prosperity, the good road.
One emerges from an investigation of the automobile industry in wonder over its expansion, and with admiration for the men behind it. Clear-cut youth, fresh vigor, compelling action galvanize it. Yet what seems to be a miracle at the end of less than ten years of growth may only be the prelude to a vaster era.
Meanwhile, each day records a new chapter of its triumphant progress.
On May 25, 1911, Porfirio Diaz resigned the Presidency of Mexico, under the compulsion of a revolution headed by Francisco Madero. This act ended an era, the Diaz era, in Mexican history. Diaz had been President for over thirty years. He had found Mexico an impoverished barbarism; he raised it to be a wealthy and at least outwardly civilized state. Some able critics, even among Europeans, had declared that Diaz, "the grand old man," was the greatest leader of the past century. All Mexicans honored him. But unfortunately for his fame he grew too old: he outlived his wisdom and his power.
Of the downfall of such a man there must naturally be conflicting views. We give here the story from the pathetic Diaz side by a well-known English writer upon Mexico, Mrs. Tweedie. Then we give the warm picture of Madero's heroic struggle against tyranny, as it appeared to Dolores Butterfield, a young lady brought up in Mexico, but driven thence by the more recent revolution which resulted in Madero's death.
Diaz has been hurled from power in his eighty-first year! The rising against him in Mexico has the character of a national revolutionary movement, the aims of which, perhaps, Madero himself has not clearly understood. One thing the nation wanted apparently was the stamping out of what the party considered political immorality, fostered and abetted by the acts of what they called thegrupo cientifico, or grafters, and by the policy of the Minister of Finance, Limantour, in particular. Therefore, when Madero stood up as the chieftain of the revolution, inscribing on his banner the redress of this grievance, with some Utopias, the people followed him without stopping to measure his capabilities. His promises were enough.
It is one of the saddest episodes in the history of great rulers, and at the same time one of the most important in the history of a country. Mexico, which has pushed so brilliantly ahead in finance, industry, and agriculture, has still lagged behind in political development. The man who made a great nation out of half-breeds and chaos was so sure of his own position, his own strength, and I may say his own motives, that he did not encourage antagonism at the polls, and "free voting" remained a name only.
A German author has said that all rulers become obsessed with the passion of rule. They lose their balance, clearness of sight, judgment, and only desire to rule, rule,rule!He was able to quote many examples. I thought of him and his theory when following, as closely as one is able to do six thousand miles away, the recent course of events in Mexico. Would he in a new edition add General Diaz to his list?
Diaz has reached a great age. On the 15th September, 1910, he celebrated his eightieth birthday. He has ruled Mexico, with one brief interval of four years, since 1876. For thirty-five years, therefore, with one short break, the country has known no other President; and Madero, who has laid him low, was a man more or less put into office by Diaz himself. A new generation of Mexicans has grown up under the rule of Diaz. Time after time he has been reelected with unanimity, no other candidate being nominated—nor even suggested. Is it to be wondered at that, by the time his seventh term expired in 1910, he should have at last come to regard himself as indispensable?
That he was so persuaded permits of no doubt. "He would remain in office so long as he thought Mexico required his services," he said in the course of the first abortive negotiations for peace—before the capture of the town of Juarez by the insurrectionists, and the surrender of the Republican troops under General Navarro took the actual settlement out of his hand.
It was a fatal mistake, and it has shrouded in deep gloom the close of a career of unexampled brilliancy, both in war and statesmanship. The Spanish-American Republics have produced no man who will compare with Porfirio Diaz. Simon Bolivar for years fought the decaying power of Spain, and to him what are now the Republics of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru owe their liberation. But Diaz has been more than a soldier, and his great achievement in the redemption of modern Mexico from bankruptcy and general decay completely overshadows his successes in the field during the ceaseless struggles of his earlier years.
Had he retired in 1910 he would have done so with honor, and every hostile voice in Mexico would have been stilled. All would have been forgotten in remembrance of the immense debt that his country owed him. He would have stood out as the great historic figure of a glorious era in the national annals. It was the first time he had broken his word with the people. Staying too long, he has been driven from office by a movement of ideas, the strength of which it is evident that he never realized until too late, and by a rebellion that in the days of his vigorous autocracy he would have stamped out with his heel.
It is a sad picture to look on, especially when I turn to that other one of the simple palace-home in Mexico City, with the fine old warrior, with dilating nostrils like a horse at the covert side, his face aglow, his eyes flashing as he told me of bygone battles, escapes from imprisonment and death, and deeds of wild adventure and romance. These inspiriting recollections he freely gave me for the "authentic biography" which he had given me permission to write. Up to that time he had refused that favor to every one; and in spite of his grateful recognition of the "honesty and veracity" of the volume I had written about his country five years before, he was long in giving his consent. "I have only done what I thought right," he said, "and it is my country and my ministers who have really made Mexico what she is." In the days of his strength, corruption was unknown in his country, and even now no finger can point at him. He retires a poor man, to live on his wife's little fortune. Diaz had the right to be egotistical, but he was modesty itself.
Yet he had risen from a barefoot lad of humble birth and little education to the dictatorship of one of the most turbulent states in the world, and this by powers of statesmanship for which, owing to want of opportunity, he had shown no aptitude before he reached middle life. Before that he seemed but a good soldier, true as steel, brave, hardy, resourceful in the field, and nothing more. It was not until he was actually President, when nearing fifty, that his gifts for government asserted themselves. Such late developments are rare, although Cromwell was forty before he made any mark. Chatham, again, was fifty before he was heard outside his own circle, and yet a few years, barely months, later, the world was at his feet.
It is rather the cry nowadays that men's best work is done before forty; and even their good work no later than sixty; but among endless exceptions General Diaz must take high rank.
His real career began at forty-six. Up to that time he had been an officer in a somewhat disorganized army, and his ambition at the outset never soared beyond a colonelcy.
He was nearly fifty when he entered Mexico City at the head of a revolutionary force. Romance and adventure were behind him, although personal peril still dogged his steps. He had to forget that he was a soldier, and to be born again as leader and politician, a maker and not a destroyer. In that capacity he had absolutely no experience of public affairs, but such as he had gained in a smaller way in early years spent in Oaxaca. Yet Diaz became a ruler, and a diplomat, and assumed the courtly manners of a prince.
Paradoxical as it may seem, his overthrow is the result of a revolution mainly pacific in its nature, and in substance a revolt of public feeling against abuses that have become stereotyped in the system of government by the too long domination of one masterful will. The military rising was but its head, spitting fire. Behind was an immense body of opinion, in favor of effecting the retirement of the President by peaceful means, and with all honor to one who had served his country well.
In 1908 General Diaz had stated frankly, in an interview granted to an American journalist, that he was enjoying his last term of office, and at its expiration would spend his remaining years in private life. There is no reason to doubt that this assurance represented his settled intention. The announcement was extensively published in the Mexican Press, and was never contradicted by the President himself. Then rumors gained currency that Diaz was not unprepared to accept nomination for the Presidency for an eighth term. The statement was at first discredited, then repeated without contradiction in a manner that could hardly have failed to excite alarm. At length came the fatal announcement that the President would stand again.
Hardly had the bell of Independence ceased ringing out in joyous clang on September 15, 1910, in celebration of free Mexico's centenary, hardly had the gorgeousfêtesfor the President's birthday or the homage paid him by the whole world run their course, when the spark of discontent became a blaze. He had mistaken the respect and regard of his people for an invitation to remain in office.
By the time the Presidential election approached, signs of agitation had increased. A political party rose in direct hostility, not so much to General Diaz himself or Limantour, as to the Vice-President, who, as next in the succession, in the event of the demise of the President, would have been able to rivet the autocracy on the country.
Corral was the Vice-President. What little I saw of him I liked; but then he had hardly taken up the reins of power. He did not make himself popular; in fact, a large part of the country hated and distrusted him. But for that, probably nothing would have been heard of the troubles which ensued. As the party anxious for the introduction of new blood into the Government increased in vigor, the people showed themselves more and more determined to get rid of Corral. They wanted a younger man than Diaz in the President's chair: they wanted, above all, the prospect of a better successor.
But the official group whose interests depended on the maintenance of the Diaz régime was, for the moment, too powerful, and it succeeded in inducing the President to accept reelection.
To the general hatred of this group on the part of the nation, Madero owed his success. He was almost unknown, but the malcontents were determined to act, and to act at once, and they could not afford to pick and choose for a leader. As a proof that the country thought less of the democratic principles invoked than of the destruction of the official "cientificos," may be cited the fact that it at first placed all its trust and confidence in General Reyes, who is just as despotic and autocratic as General Diaz, but has at the same time, to them, a redeeming quality—his avowed opposition to the gang. Reyes refused to head the insurrection, and it was then Madero or nobody.
In the spring of 1910 Francis I. Madero came to the front. He was a man of education, of fortune, of courage, and a lawyer by profession. He had written a book entitled thePresidential Succession, and although without experience in the management of State affairs, he had shown that he had the courage of his convictions. He consented to stand against Diaz in a contest for the Presidency of the Republic.
The malcontents had found their leader. Madero not only accepted nomination, but began an active campaign, making speeches against the Diaz administration, denouncing abuses, more especially the retention of office by the Vice-President and the tactics of Limantour, and showing the people that as General Diaz was then eighty years of age, and his new term would not expire until 1916, Corral would almost certainly succeed to the inheritance of the Diaz regime.
Energetic, courageous, and outspoken, Madero had full command of the phraseology of the demagog. His only shortcoming in the eyes of his own party was that he had not been persecuted by the Government. The officials, alas, soon supplied this deficiency. A few days before the Presidential election in July, 1910, when making a speech in Monterey, Madero was arrested as a disturber of the peace and thrown into prison, where he was kept until the close of the poll.
The election resulted, as usual, in a triumphant majority for General Diaz, though votes were recorded, even in the capital itself, for the anti-reelectionist leader.
As soon as opportunity offered, Madero escaped to the United States, and from that vantage-ground kept up a correspondence with his friends and partizans. Though the election had been held in July, the inauguration of the President did not take place until December, 1910. A fortnight before that date, a conspiracy, at which Madero probably connived, was discovered in Puebla. The first victim was the Chief of the Police at Puebla. He was shot dead by a woman who at his knock had opened the door of a house wherein the revolutionists were holding a meeting. The revolution had begun. Risings took place in different parts of the Republic, but were quickly quelled, with the exception of one in the State of Chihuahua, where the rebels had a special grievance against the all-powerful family of the great landowner, General Terrazas. These large landed proprietors are a subject of hatred to the new Socialist party.
Trouble followed trouble in the north, which, be it remembered, runs to a distance of over a thousand miles from Mexico City itself. But nothing very serious occurred, until suddenly, in the early weeks of 1911, President Taft mobilized a force of 20,000 American troops to watch the Mexican frontier. From that time events developed rapidly till the end of the Diaz regime in May. One thing became clear, that the revolution was rapidly making its way to victory, and that Diaz, prostrate with an agonizing disease, an abscess of the jaw, was in no condition to rally his disheartened followers in person. He saved his honor, as the phrase goes, by a declaration that he would not retire from office until peace was declared, and he kept his word. He was too ill to leave his simple home in one of the chief streets of the city, where he lived less ostentatiously than many of his fellow citizens, but this did not prevent the mob from firing upon his home. On the afternoon of May 25, 1911, he resigned, and Señor De La Barra, formerly Minister at Washington, became provisional President until the next election, fixed for October.
Madero was the hero of the hour. He entered Mexico City in triumphal procession, June 7, 1911. His entrance was preceded by the most severe earthquake the capital had known in years. Many buildings were wrecked and some hundreds of people killed. An arch of the National Palace fell, one beneath which Diaz had often passed.
Three days after signing his abdication, General Diaz was well enough to leave Mexico City. In the early hours of the morning three trains drew up filled with his own solders and friends, in the middle one of which the ex-President, his wife, the clever and beautiful Carmelita, Colonel Porfirio Diaz, his son, with his young wife, several children, and their ten-days-old baby, were seated. Along the route the train came upon a force of seven hundred rebels. A sharp encounter ensued. The revolutionists left thirty dead upon the field; the escort, which numbered but three hundred, lost only three men. The old fighting spirit returned to the old lion, and, unarmed, the ex-President descended from his car and took part in the engagement. He entered Mexico City fighting, and he has left her shores with bullets ringing in the air. This was but the second time that Diaz had left the land of his birth.
His work is now imperishable. Mexicans, I am sure, will regret the pitiful circumstances under which his fall has come about, and he will live long in the hearts of his countrymen. Nothing can alter the fact that he made modern Mexico. It was no easy task; the Mexicans are a cross-breed of Spaniards and countless Indian tribes. There are still half a million Aztecs. Diaz has given this strange mixed race education, and a high order of education for such a people; he has brought his country to a financial position in which the Government can, or could, borrow all the money it wanted at four per cent. Railways intersect the land in every direction. The largest financial interests are American, the next in importance are British. Except Germany, no other foreign country has much capital invested in Mexico.
Thus closes one of the most wild and romantic episodes of the world's history—a peasant boy who became a soldier, a general who became a President—a President who became a great autocrat, who raised a country from obscurity to greatness, and was finally driven from power by the very people he had educated, and to whom he had brought vast blessings.
The great Diaz in his eighty-first year has passed from power, the power he used so well. Verily a moving spectacle from first to last.
[Footnote 1: Reproduced by permission from theNorth American Review.]
In contemplating the present situation in Mexico there is a tendency of late to deplore the Madero revolution and the overthrow of Diaz, and to overlook the fact that the Diaz regime itself not only made and forced, by its political abuses, the revolution that overthrew it, but, by its economic abuses, prepared the country for the anarchy now rife in it; and also that it is the very same ring of men who surrounded Diaz and finally rendered his rule unbearable who are now financing and fomenting the present rebellion against a Government not in sympathy with them nor subservient to their interests.
Porfirio Diaz attained the presidency of Mexico thirty-five years ago by overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada. He put an end to brigandage, which was at that time wide-spread. Such bandits as he could not buy he exterminated. His political opponents he also bought or exterminated, so that without the slightest disturbance to the national peace he could be unanimously reelected whenever his term expired. Out of bankruptcy he established credit; he put up schools; he invited foreign capital into his country and made it possible for foreign capital to go in; and so he gradually built up a material progress which won him the name of "nation-builder." There were railroads and telegraphs; the cities were graced with beautiful edifices, with theaters and parks, with electricity and asphalt. There was the appearance of a civilization and progress, which, considering the time in which it was compassed, was indeed marvelous.
But all this was only a shell and a semblance. The economic condition of the Mexican lower classes was not touched—the process of "nation-building" seemed not to include them. In the shadow of a modern civilization stalked poverty and ignorance worthy of the Middle Ages. And it was notorious that in the capital city itself, under the very eyes of the central Government, was where the very worst conditions and the most glaring extremes of poverty and wealth were to be seen. On the one hand, splendidpaseoslined with magnificent palaces, where, in their automobiles, the pleasure-seeking women of the rich displayed their raiment worth thousands of dollars; and, on the other, streets filled with beggars, their clothes literally dropping off them in filthy rags, reeking with the typhus which for years has been endemic in the City of Mexico.
Let it be said to Diaz's credit that he did try, in a measure, at first to better those conditions. Hence the public schools which, though inadequate for the scattered rural population, have accomplished much in the cities. He also attempted years ago a division of the lands, but dropped it when he saw that the great landowners were stronger than he and that to persist might cost him the Presidency.
It was natural and inevitable that a Government in which there was never any change or movement should stagnate and become corrupt. Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he may have been patriotic and disinterested—as to a great extent he undeniably was. These men were the Cientificos.
The term is, of course, not their own. It was applied to them by the Anti-reelectionists, meaning that they were scientific grafters and exploiters. The full-fledged Cientifico was at once a tremendous landholder and high government official. To illustrate, the land of the State of Chihuahua is almost entirely owned by the Terrazas family. In the days of Diaz, Don Luis Terrazas was always the governor, being further reenforced by his relative, Enrique C. Creel, high in the Diaz ministry. In Sonora the land was held by Ramon Corral, Luis Torres, and Rafael Izabal. These three gentlemen, who were called "The Trinity," used to rotate in the government of the state until Corral was made vice-president, when Torres and Izabal took turn about until the death of the latter shortly before the Madero revolution. In every state there was either one perpetual governor or a combine of them.
Thus in each state a small group of men were the absolute masters politically, economically, and industrially. They made and unmade the laws at their pleasure. For instance, Terrazas imposed a prohibitory tax upon cattle which forced the small owners to dispose of their stock, which he, being the only purchaser, bought at his own price, after which he repealed the law. They adjusted taxation to suit themselves, assessing their own huge estates at figures nothing short of ridiculous, while levying heavily upon the small farmer, and especially upon enterprise and improvements. They practised peonage, though peonage is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, to the Federal laws, and, in many cases, to the laws of the separate states as well. They drew public salaries for perverting the government to their private benefit and enrichment; and as the dictator grew older and surrendered to his satellites more and more of his once absolute power, the conditions became so intolerable, and the tyranny and greed of the Cientificos so shameless and unbridled (infinitely more so in the southern than in the northern states), that it would have been a reversal of the history of the world if there had been no revolution.
In 1910 the aged Diaz declared his intention of resigning. Perhaps he even intended to keep that promise when he made it; but if so, the Cientificos, who knew that his prestige and the love of the nation for him were their only shield, induced him to think better of it. The strongest of the opposing parties was the Anti-reelectionist party. It embodied the best elements and the best ideals of the country and from the first was the one of which the Diaz regime was most afraid.
Now by its very name this party was pledged to no reelection, and yet it so far compromised with the regime as to nominate Diaz for President, only repudiating Corral, who was odious to the entire nation. However, the Cientificos saw that this was to be the entering wedge, and they promptly prepared to crush the new political faction. Anti-reelectionists were arrested right and left; their newspapers were suppressed, the presses wrecked, and the editors thrown into prison. But the party's blood was up. It did not dissolve. It did not nominate Corral. Instead it struck Porfirio Diaz's name from its ticket and tendered to Francisco Madero, Jr., not the vice-presidential but the presidential nomination. The bare fact that he accepted it speaks volumes for his courage.
Francisco Madero was born October 4, 1873. He was educated from childhood in the United States and Europe; and upon returning to his country, imbued with the advanced ideas of the most broad-minded men of the most enlightened countries in the world, it was perhaps only natural that he should resent the conditions which he saw in his own country. The Madero family owns great tracts of land in Coahuila, besides properties in other states. Madero introduced modern methods and modern machinery in the management of his estates. Already a millionaire, he made more millions, at the same time doing much toward the betterment of conditions for his own immediate dependents among the lower class.
Madero first attracted attention by writingThe Presidential Succession in 1910. The Cientifico clique laughed at him as a visionary. Suddenly they awoke to the fact that his book, with its calm, dispassionate logic and democratic tone, was doing them more harm than a thousand soldiers, and they suppressed its publication. It was the writing of this book that led to Madero's nomination for President by the Anti-reelectionist party when every one else had failed it.
Madero took the attitude that he was a presidential candidate in a free republic and began what he called his democratic campaign. He went from city to city, delivering speeches and laying his platform before the people. He was called "the apostle of democracy," and the multitudes followed him like an apostle indeed. But he did not carry out his democratic campaign without sacrifice and risk. When he passed through Hermosillo, Sonora, the hotel-keepers closed their-doors to him. Torres, feudal lord of the state, had given out the necessary hint and Madero, for all his millions, could find no apartments for himself and his wife until a Spaniard—relying upon the fact of being a foreigner— offered them lodgings, "not wishing to lend himself to so ignoble an intrigue." This was but one city of many. In all places he had the most tremendous difficulty in renting halls for his addresses. Frequently he was reduced to speaking in tumble-down sheds or mule-yards or vacant lots, the local authorities often hiring rowdies to create disturbances at his meetings. He was ridiculed, he was threatened, he was persecuted, but he went on unafraid.
Just before and during the elections every known Maderista, from Madero down, was arrested on charges of "sedition." Things came to such a pass that in the city where I lived some sixty prominent Maderistas were arrested at two o'clock one morning without warrants and on no charge, it being noteworthy that the men arrested were almost without exception some of the best and most honorable men in the state. And this happened at the same hour of the same day in every city in Mexico. But in spite of the fact that many votes were lost to Madero through intimidation or actual imprisonment, so strong a vote was registered for the Madero electors that fraud was resorted to to cover his gains. The result of the elections was that Diaz and Corral wereunanimouslyreelected—the former for his eighth term and the latter for his second.
The Anti-reelectionists then appealed to Congress and the Senate to annul the elections, alleging fraud and intimidation. Without the slightest pretense of considering or investigating these charges Congress and Senate—long the mouthpieces of Cientificismo—ratified the elections as just and legal. Every peaceful measure to bring about justice in the elections and insure the free expression of the nation's will was now exhausted. The only recourse left to the people by the Cientifico regime was war. Their leader at the polls became their leader in the preparations for that war.
In the midst of this riot of tyranny, while the nation yet seethed with indignation at the outrageous electoral farce imposed upon it, the first Centennial of Mexican independence was being celebrated before the foreign diplomats with unprecedented pomp and display. The Anti-reelectionists declared that Liberty was dead and that instead of celebrating they were going to don deep mourning. They were thus a mark for all manner of persecutions from petty annoyances to the most unprovoked armed attacks. Some students were fired upon by troops while they were carrying wreaths to the monument of the boy heroes of Chapultepec; a young lawyer was arrested for making a speech beneath the statue of Juarez; and in Tlaxcala a procession of unarmed working men was fired upon and ridden down byrurales, several men and a woman being killed. Consecrating hypocritical hymns to liberty that did not exist and heaping with wreaths the tombs and monuments of the heroes of Mexico, while violating all the ideals for which those heroes died, drunk with the power they had wielded so long, the Cientificos pressed blindly on, following the path that Privilege has taken since the beginning of history and which has only one end.
These are some of the causes and circumstances that made the revolution of 1910-11—not all of them, for there must be remembered in addition the Yaqui slave traffic, the contract-labor system of the great southern haciendas, and a dozen other iniquities, greater and lesser, which also contributed to precipitating the revolt. It was fortunate that that revolt was captained by a man of Francisco Madero'stype—a man who knew how to win the world's sympathy for his cause and how to make his subordinates merit that sympathy by their observance of the rules of civilized warfare.
The actual armed contention of the Madero revolution was singularly brief, culminating in the capture of Ciudad Juarez, which was followed by the resignation of Diaz and Corral. There can be no doubt that the dictatorship could have held together for a considerable time longer and that Diaz surrendered before he actually had to. But he could probably see by this time that it was inevitable in any case, and he was willing to sacrifice his personal pride and ambition sooner than necessary to avoid bloodshed in Mexico if he could. And also he had it upon his conscience, and it was brought home to him by the mobs outside his palace, that he was not the constitutional President of Mexico, but the tool of the betrayers of her Constitution. That he had been shamelessly deceived and played upon by the impassable cordon of Cientificos about him is easy to judge. His message of resignation was one to touch any heart, combining pathos with absolute dignity.
The resignation of Diaz and Corral was taken by many to signify the complete surrender of the old régime and the triumph of the revolution. Indeed, for the moment it so appeared. But although the Cientificos were ousted from direct political control, their wealth and power and the tremendous machinery of their domination were still to be contended with before the revolution could follow up its political success with the economic reforms which were its real object.
Madero had pledged himself primarily to the division of the lands. He realized that only by the abolition of the landed aristocracy, and an equitable distribution among moderate holders for active development of the huge estates, held idle in great part or worked by peons, could the progress and prosperity of the nation be put upon a solid basis. He knew exactly what the remedy was and, though a landed aristocrat himself by birth and inheritance, was not afraid of it.
As soon as he was elected to the presidency he set a committee of competent, accredited engineers to work appraising property values in the different states, and great tracts of hundreds of thousands and millions of acres, previously assessed at half as many thousands as they were worth millions, were revalued and reassessed at their true inherent value. Thehaciendadosraised a frightful cry. They tried threats, intrigue, and bribery. It was useless; the revaluation went on. The new administration reclaimed as national property all that it could of theterrenos baldios, or public lands, which under Diaz had been rapidly merging into the great estates. It established a government bank for the purpose of making loans on easy terms, and thus assisting the poor to take up and work these public lands in small parcels. Even before becoming President, Madero had advised the working men to organize and demand a living wage, which they did. He attacked the lotteries, the bull-fights, the terrible pulque trust, the unbridled traffic of which, more than any other one factor, has contributed to the degradation of the lower classes. He began to extend the public-school system.
From the first the Cientificos hampered and impeded him. To foment a counter-revolution they took advantage of the fact that in various parts of the country there were disorderly bands of armed men committing numerous depredations. These men had risen up in the shadow of the Maderista revolution, and at its close, instead of laying down their arms, they devoted themselves to the looting of ranches and ungarrisoned isolated towns. Of these brigands—for they were neither more nor less, whatever they may have called themselves then or may call themselves now—the most formidable was Emiliano Zapata. His alleged reason for continuing in arms after the surrender of the dictatorship was that his men had not been paid for their services. President De la Barra paid them, but their brigandage continued. And at the most critical moment Pascual Orozco, Jr., Madero's trusted lieutenant, in command of the military forces of Chihuahua, issued—on the heels of reiterated promises of fealty to the Government—apronunciamientoin favor of the revolution and delivered the state which had been entrusted to his keeping to the revolutionists, at whose head he now placed himself.
The new malcontents declared that Madero had betrayed the revolution, and that they were going to overthrow him and themselves carry out the promises he had made. This sounds heroic, noble, and patriotic, but will not bear close inspection. In the first place, many of the revolutionists with whom the new faction allied itself had been in arms since before Madero was even elected—a trivial circumstance, however, which did not seem to shake their logic. Moreover, as any honest, fair-minded person must have recognized, the promises of Madero were not such as he could fulfil with a wave of his hand or a stroke of his pen. They were big promises and they required time and careful study for their successful undertaking and the cooperation of the people at large against the public enemies, whereas Madero was not given time nor favorable circumstances nor the intelligent cooperation of any but a small proportion of the population.
As a matter of fact, Madero himself, far from overstating the benefits of the revolution led by him or making unwise promises of a Utopia impossible of realization, addressed these words to the Mexican people at the close of that conflict: "You have won your political freedom, but do not therefore suppose that youreconomicand social liberty can be won so suddenly. This can only be attained by an earnest and sustained effort on the part of all classes of society."
It is to be feared that for long years to come Mexico must stand judged in the eyes of the world by the disgraceful and uncivilized conduct of the various rebels, or so-called rebels, and simon-pure bandits who are contributing to the revolt and running riot over the country; but there is, nevertheless, in Mexico a class of people as educated, as refined, as honorable as those existing anywhere. And these people—theobreros(skilled working men) and the professional middle class, as well as the better elements of the laboring classes, are supporting Madero—not all in the spirit of his personal adherents, but because they realize the tremendous peril to Mexico of continued revolution. In 1911 the revolution was necessary—the peril had to be incurred, because nothing but arms could move the existing despotism; but none of the pretended principles of the revolution can now justify that peril when the man attacked is the legal, constitutional, duly elected President, overwhelmingly chosen by the people, and venomously turned upon immediately following his election without being given even an approach to a fair chance to prove himself.
All the better elements of the country realize that Madero no longer represents an individual or even a political administration. He represents the civilization of Mexico struggling against the unreined savagery of a population which has known no law but abject fear, and having lost that fear and the restraint which it imposed upon it, threatens to deliver Mexico to such a reign of anarchy, rapine, and terror as would be without a parallel in modern history. He represents the dignity and integrity of Mexico before the world.
Whatever the outcome, whether it triumphs or fails, the new administration, assailed on every side by an enemy as treacherous and unscrupulous as it is powerful, and making a last stand—perhaps a vain one—for Mexico's economic liberty and political independence, merits the support and comprehension of all the progressive elements of the world.
On August 10, 1911, the ancient British House of Lords gathered in somber and resentful session and solemnly voted for the "Parliament Bill," a measure which reduced their own importance in the government to a mere shadow. This vote came as the climax of a five-year struggle. The Lords have for generations been a Conservative body, holding back every Liberal measure of importance in England. Of late years the Liberal party has protested with ever-increasing vehemence against the unfairness of this unbalanced system, by means of which the Conservatives when elected to power by the people could legislate as they pleased, whereas the Liberals, though they might carry elections overwhelmingly, were yet blocked in all their chief purposes of legislation.
When the Liberals found themselves elected to power by a vast majority in 1905, they were still seeking to get on peaceably with the Lords, but this soon proved impossible. In January of 1910 the Liberals deliberately adjourned Parliament and appealed to the people in a new election. They were again returned to power, though by a reduced majority; yet the Lords continued to oppose them. Again they appealed to the people in December of 1910, this time with the distinct announcement that if re-elected to authority they would pass the "Parliament Bill" destroying the power of the Lords. In this third election they were still upheld by the people. Hence when the Lords resisted the Parliament Bill, King George stood ready to create as many new Peers from the Liberal party as might be necessary to pass the offensive bill through the House of Lords. It was in face of this threat that the Lords yielded at last, and voted most unwillingly for their own loss of power.
Of this great step in the democratizing of England, we give three characteristic British views—first, that of a well-known Liberal member of Parliament, who naturally approves of it; secondly, that of a fair-minded though despondent Conservative; and thirdly, that of a rabid Conservative who can see nothing but shame, ruin, and the extreme of wickedness in the change. He speaks in the tone of the "Die-hards," the Peers who refused all surrender and held out to the last, raving at their opponents, assailing them with curses and even with fists, and in general aiding the rest of the world to realize that the manners of some portion of the British Peerage needed reform quite as much as their governmental privileges.
A great and memorable struggle has ended with the passage of the Parliament Bill into law. In the calm atmosphere of retrospect we may now look back on the various stages of this prolonged conflict, from its inception to its completion, and further, with the whole scene before us, we may reflect on the wider meaning and real significance of the victory which has been gained on behalf of democracy, freedom, and popular self-government.
In the progressive cause there can be no finality, no termination to the combat, no truce, no rest. But we may fairly regard the conclusion of this particular struggle as the achievement of a notable step in advance and as the acquisition of territory that can not well be recaptured. The admission of the Parliament Bill to the statute-book marks an epoch and fills the hearts of those who are pursuing high ideals in politics and sociology with great hopes for the future. The long sequence of the events which have led up to this achievement has not been smooth or without incident. There have been moments of failure, of rebuff, and even of disaster. It would almost seem as if the motive power which has carried the party of progress through the storm and stress, and landed it in security, had been outside the control of any one man or any set of men. Although distinguished men have led and there have been many valiant workers in the field, a movement that has extended over nearly a hundred years must have its origin and energy deeper down than in any mere party policy. It is the inevitable outcome of the steady but inexorable evolution of free institutions among a liberty-loving people.
In order, first of all, to trace the course of the actual controversy as it has been carried on in the House of Commons and in the country, it is not necessary to go further back than 1883. In that year the Lords had rejected the Franchise Bill, and it was then that Mr. Bright, in a speech at Leeds dealing with the deadlocks between the two Houses, sketched a plan which was really the essence and origin of the principle adopted in the Parliament Act that has just become law. The Lords had rejected many Liberal measures before then; attempts had been made to get round or overcome their opposition; but not till then was any practical method formulated for dealing with the serious and permanent obstruction to progressive legislation. Mr. Bright himself had condemned the peers and declared that "their arrogance and class selfishness had long been at war with the highest interests of the nation," and now he advocated a specific remedy, which he declared would be obtained by "limiting the veto which the House of Lords exercises over the proceedings of the House of Commons." The actual plan was that a Bill rejected by the Lords should be sent up to them again, "but when the Bill came down to the House of Commons in the second session, and the Commons would not agree to the amendments of the Lords, then the Lords should be bound to accept the Bill." This method of procedure, it will be seen, was more expeditious and drastic than the scheme in the Parliament Act.
Mr. Chamberlain joined vigorously in the campaign against the Peers. Telling passages from his speeches are quoted to this day, such as when he declared that "the House of Lords had never contributed one iota to popular liberty and popular freedom, or done anything to advance the common weal," but "had protected every abuse and sheltered every privilege."
No further mention of the Bright scheme was made for some time. Six years of Conservative rule (1886-1892) diverted the attention of Liberals as a party in opposition to other matters, and the Lords subsided, as they always have done in such periods, into an entirely innocuous, negligible, and utterly useless adjunct of the Conservative Government.
In the brief period between 1892-1895, the animus against the House of Lords was kindled afresh. Several Liberal Bills were mutilated or lost, and the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill served to fan the flames into a dangerous blaze. The Bright plan was recalled by Lord Morley. "I think," he said (at Newcastle on May 21, 1894), "there will have to be some definite attempt to carry out what Mr. Bright at the Leeds Conference of 1883 suggested, by which the power of the House of Lords—this non-elected, this non-representative, this hereditary, this packed Tory Chamber—by which the veto of that body shall be strictly limited." Mr. Gladstone, too, in his last speech in the House of Commons on the wrecking amendments which the Lords had made on the Parish Councils Bill, dwelt on the fundamental differences between the two Houses, and said that "a state of things had been created which could not continue," and declared it to be "a controversy which once raised must go forward to an issue."
But by far the most formidable, the most vigorous, the most animated, and, at the time, apparently sincere attack was contained in a series of speeches delivered in 1894 by Lord Rosebery, who was then in a position of responsibility as leader of the Liberal party. If, as subsequent events have shown, he was unmoved by the underlying principle and cause for which his eloquent pleading stood, anyhow we must believe he was deeply impressed by the prospect of his personal ambition as the leader of a party being thwarted by the contemptuous action of an irresponsible body. His words, however, stand, and have been quoted again and again as the most effective attack against the partizan nature of the Second Chamber:—"What I complain of in the House of Lords is that during the tenure of one Government it is a Second Chamber of an inexorable kind, but while another Government is in, it is no Second Chamber at all… Therefore the result, the effect of the House of Lords as it at present stands, is this, that in one case it acts as a Court of Appeal, and a packed Court of Appeal, against the Liberal party, while in the other case, the case of the Conservative Government, it acts not as a Second Chamber at all. In the one case we have the two Chambers under a Liberal Government, under a Conservative Government we have a single Chamber. Therefore, I say, we are face to face with a great difficulty, a great danger, a great peril to the State." So vehement and repeated were Lord Rosebery's denunciations that grave anxiety is said to have been caused in the highest quarters.
But for the next ten years (1895-1905) the Conservatives were in office, and again it was impossible to bring the matter to a head, though the past was not forgotten. When the Liberals were returned in 1906 with their colossal majority, every Liberal was well aware that before long the same trouble would inevitably arise, and that a settlement of the question could not be long delayed. The record of the House of Lords' activities during the last five years has been so indelibly impressed on the public mind that only a very brief recapitulation of events is necessary.
At the outset their action was tentative. This was shown by the conferences and negotiations to arrive at a settlement on the Education Bill, which was the first Liberal measure in 1906. But these broke down, and defiance was found to be completely successful. Mr. Balfour, the leader of the Conservative party, realized that although he was in a small minority in the House of Commons, yet he could still control legislation, and when he saw how effectively the destructive weapon of the veto could be used he became bolder, and, as with all vicious habits, increased indulgence encouraged appetite. Had Mr. Balfour played his trump-card—the Lords' veto—with greater foresight and restraint, it may safely be said that the House of Lords might have continued for another generation, or, at any rate, for another decade, with its authority unimpaired, though sooner or later it was bound to abuse its power; but the temptation was too great, and Mr. Balfour became reckless.
The three crucial mistakes on the part of the Opposition from the point of view of pure tactics were: First, the destruction of the Education Bill of 1906. In view of the historic attitude of the Lords to all questions of religious freedom and general enlightenment, it was not surprising that they should stand in the way of a greater equality of opportunity for all denominations in matters of education. Six times between 1838 and 1857 they rejected Bills for removing Jewish disabilities; three times between 1858 and 1869 they vetoed the abolition of Church Rates. For thirty-six years (1835-1871) the admission of Nonconformists to the universities by the abolition of tests was delayed by them. It was only to be expected, therefore, that they would be deaf to the popular outcry that had been caused by the Balfour Education Bill of 1902. But in the very first session of the Parliament in which the Government had been returned to power by the immense majority of 354, that they should immediately show their teeth and claws was, from their own point of view, as events proved, a vital error. Their second mistake was the rejection in 1908 by a body of Peers at Lansdowne House of the Licensing Bill, which had occupied many weeks of the time of the House of Commons. This was rightly regarded as a gratuitous insult to the House of elected representatives. Finally, their culminating act of folly was the rejection of the Budget in 1909. It was an outrageous breach of acknowledged constitutional practise, which alienated from them a large body of moderate opinion. In addition to these three notable measures there were, of course, a number of other Bills on land, electoral, and social reform that were either mutilated or thrown out during this period. How could any politician in his senses suppose that a party who possessed any degree of confidence in the country would tamely submit to treatment such as this? While the Lords proceeded light-heartedly with their wrecking tactics, the Liberal Government slowly and cautiously, but with great deliberation, took action step by step. A provocative move on the part of the Lords was met each time by a counter-move, and thus gradually the final and decisive phase of the dispute was reached.
After the loss of the Education Bill of 1906, the first note of warning was sounded by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. "The resources of the House of Commons," he declared, "are not exhausted, and I say with conviction that a way must be found, and a way will be found, by which the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives in this House will be made to prevail."
The first mention of the subject in a King's Speech occurred in March, 1907, when this significant phrase was used: "Serious questions affecting the working of our party system have arisen from unfortunate differences between the two Houses. My Ministers have this important subject under consideration with a view to the solution of the difficulty."
On June 24, 1907, the matter was first definitely brought before the House. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman moved that "in order to give effect to the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives, it is necessary that the power of the other House to alter or reject Bills passed by this House should be so restricted by law as to secure that within the limits of a single Parliament the final decision of the Commons shall prevail." To the evident surprize of the Opposition he sketched a definite plan for curtailing the veto of the House of Lords. This was followed in July by the introduction of resolutions laying down in full detail the exact procedure. In his statement Sir Henry made it very clear that the issue was confined to the relations between the two Houses:—"Let me point out that the plan which I have sketched to the House does not in the least preclude or prejudice any proposals which may be made for the reform of the House of Lords. The constitution and composition of the House of Lords is a question entirely independent of my subject. My resolution has nothing to do with the relations of the two Houses to the Crown, but only with the relations of the two Houses to each other."
In 1908, Mr. Asquith became Prime Minister, but no further action was taken. On the rejection of the Licensing Bill, however, he showed that the Government were fully aware of the extreme gravity of the question, but intended to choose their own time to deal with it. Speaking at the National Liberal Club in December, he said: "The question I want to put to you and to my fellow Liberals outside is this: Is this state of things to continue? We say that it must be brought to an end, and I invite the Liberal party to-night to treat the veto of the House of Lords as the dominating issue in politics—the dominant issue, because in the long run it overshadows and absorbs every other." When pressed on the Address at the beginning of the following session by his supporters, who were impatient for action, he explained the position of the Government: "I repeat we have no intention to shirk or postpone the issue we have raised…. I can give complete assurance that at the earliest possible moment consistent with the discharge by this Parliament of the obligations I have indicated, the issue will be presented and submitted to the country."