The Long Recessional by David Gilmour

Author:David Gilmour
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141990897
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Free Trade was thus the ‘direct parent’ of socialism because ‘the workman cannot live on the wage which his European and Asiatic protected fellow workers – not the capitalist – allow him’.14

In the autumn of 1903 Chamberlain resigned and took his case to the country. Balfour re-balanced his Cabinet by disposing of three Free Trade ministers and remaining, as he often did, perched elegantly on the fence. With most of the press and Westminster against him, Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform League were faced with an enormous task of persuasion. But they soon acquired the support of the Standard and the Daily Express, edited respectively by Gwynne and R.D.Blumenfeld, an American expatriate and inventor of the unmemorable slogan, ‘Tariff Reform Means Work for All’.

Both men were friends of Kipling and both were among the great survivors of Fleet Street – Blumenfeld editing the Express until 1929, Gwynne in charge of the Standard and then the intrepidly reactionary Morning Post until 1939. Much of their time at their desks was spent reading and reacting to exhortations from Bateman’s: whom to employ, where to send him, what to write about, what line to take, what to emphasize and what to leave out altogether. Gwynne relished the treatment, frequently travelling to Sussex for more personal urgings. Kipling thought him ‘as straight and as honest as they make them’ – a curious description of one of Fleet Street’s most notorious intriguers – and Carrie also approved. ‘Such a nice man,’ she noted in her diary, ‘and very keen for the game of Empire’.15

While he incited support for Tariff Reform, Kipling was naturally more interested in the human aspect of imperial consolidation. He helped The Children of the Empire, an association aimed at fostering ‘awareness’ among the youth of the Five Nations. He urged colonies to advertise themselves better in Britain, to establish shops in London in which to display their produce, because the British had not ‘even begun to scratch the Empire from a commercial point of view’.16 But his main pursuit was the encouragement of emigration to the dominions.

British emigrants, as the Liberal politician Sir Charles Dilke had pointed out, cared little as a body whether they went to lands flying the Union Jack: they crossed the seas ‘at the prompting not of sentiment but of interest’.17 The statistics provide confirmation: during the last four decades of the Victorian Empire, well over half the people leaving Britain settled in the United States. Much disturbed by the trend, Kipling castigated the mismanagement that had allowed America to drain from the Empire ‘a many million good, competent and law-fearing men’ and change them into mere ‘citoyens’.18 Particularly alarmed by the situation in South Africa, where the defeated Boers still outnumbered the British, he urged schemes of emigration to the Transvaal and what was currently called Orange River Colony. Although landowners might be reluctant to lose their best young farmers, counties should be encouraged to select men and collect subscriptions so that they could begin a new life in South Africa.

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