Lord Billericay, who took an active interest in politics in his young days, used to tell me that the Labour Government, in his opinion, might have lasted sixteen years instead of six if they had only let racing alone. The truth was that Charles Ropes, although he seemed the only possible leader of the party when Rosenstein went into his cure, was a doctrinaire of the old Nonconformist type. The result was that when the Horses Utilization Bill was thrown out and the Government resigned on it, there were bills for the disestablishment of the Church, universal secular education, the taxation of town sites, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the demobilization of two-thirds of the army, all waiting to pass their third reading and all regarded as non-contentious measures. In the very hour of its achievement the Government had gone out, leaving no permanent memorial of its tenure of office except Indian Home Rule and the Entente with Russia. Its publication of our treaties with foreign powers, from which such a commotion was expected, proved after all to be a false alarm; for the terms of them were so inconsistent with one another that they were immediately treated as forgeries.
It was a far more difficult question who was to take up the reins of power which had been thus abruptly dropped. Lord Hopedale’s efforts to form a Conservative ministry were at once greeted with the threat of a strike from 138 separate industries. The Liberals vainly appealed for a lead to six different statesmen, all of whom refused to leave their retirement. The attempt to form a new Labour Government, which would disown Mr. Ropes and his Horses Utilization Bill, the “Sporting Workers” as they were called, proved a fiasco. People were seriously questioning whether the affairs of the nation would not have to be openly administered by the Crown. And then began that unique political expedient which has gone down to history with the short-lived dictatorship of Sulla and the Jesuit Government of Paraguay.
I see that Mrs. McKechnie, in her _Reminiscences_, attributes the suggestion to a letter in the _Daily News_. I am sorry to have to supply a correction to a work otherwise so distinguished by accuracy; but I happen to remember the circumstances with peculiar exactness, because I was at Oxford at the time, living in a whirl of political activities such as one only makes for oneself at Oxford, and consequently in a better position to give first-hand evidence than a writer who is speaking of a period when she had not yet left the nursery for the schoolroom. For about a fortnight on end the _Daily Mail_ had a series of letters saying, “Dear Sir, Why do you not save the country by taking its destinies into your own hands? Yours etc. INDIGNANT ENGLISHMAN,” and so on. At the end of this time an article in the _Daily News_ (not a letter) made the suggestion that newspaper proprietors should become a ruling caste according to the size of their circulation: but any one who read the article in the spirit in which it was written could see quite clearly that _it was all meant for a joke_, a satire on the wearisome correspondence which was being printed by its contemporary. That the _Mail_ took the initiative in treating the suggestion seriously is evident from the fact that its circulation at the time was nearly half a million ahead. It was the _Mail_, too, which first proposed that the less popular dailies should combine with the more widely sold ones, so as to avoid group Government: and it is noteworthy, that the _Evening News_ fell in with this suggestion two days before the _Star_.