Imperial Crisis and Imperial Renewal: Britain and her Empire, 1919-1923

General TL Update

I am happy to say that we are nearing the end of the First Revolutionary Era! There will be a final post on 1924 - the year of struggle - and then we will be off to the “Interregnum Period”. Thanks again to all my readers. I’m really excited to get to the next part of the TL, where I’m hoping to write much more about everyday life, culture, and mentalities in this brave new world!

Imperial Crisis and Imperial Renewal: Britain and her Empire, 1919-1923 ​

The world has become a lunatic asylum run by lunatics. We all must be on guard against infection by the general madness of the times.

-David Lloyd George _

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. _

-Winston Churchill

Like the rest of us, I believed Winston Churchill to be a young man of promise, but it appears he was simply a young man of promises.

-Arthur Balfour

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A wise man once said: there are times when everything must change if everything is to stay the same. In November 1919, the British world-system hung tenuously on the precipice. India was in open revolt. Egypt was aflame. A Eurasian behemoth was in the process of being born. London’s vaunted financial position was under assault from across the Atlantic. The dominions, who had thrown their men into the meatgrinder of the western front, demanded that their soldiers be repatriated. The century-long project of domesticating the northern working class appeared to have unravelled.

And yet, four years later Britain would emerge triumphant from its seemingly terminal imperial crisis. Every point at which it at last appeared that the British system was collapsing into the abyss, it would be pulled back up - by luck, by outside assistance, or by the sudden and miraculous exhaustion of its manifold enemies. This is the story of how British power, perhaps the most reviled and ridiculed imperium of the 20th century, transformed and reconstituted itself. This is the story of how the despotic liberal-imperialism of the 19th century remade itself to confront the new world-order.

The field-marshals who led Britain through its era of crisis were outsiders. Not, of course, of the customary sort - not outsiders from society writ large, elements generally exogenous to the ruling class - but outsiders nonetheless, men who had broken with their party, who held strange and novel ideas. The two prime figures here are Winston Churchill and Lloyd George. The former was a lapsed welfare liberal, a Georgist at heart, who had left the party for principally opportunistic reasons. He had been offered a better deal by the Tories, who nonetheless distrusted his immoderate personality, demagoguery, and ideological flexibility. Then there was Lloyd George himself, a man who at one point had been universally recognized to be on the left-wing of the liberals, who had grown popular by introducing a “people’s budget” that catered to the working-classes. In wartime, however, he had shown himself a staunch ally of the most hawkish elements of the government, and had not flinched at employing unconventional and extreme measures to keep Britain in the war.

Above all, what distinguished Churchill and Lloyd George was their unflinching readiness to transform and renovate the British state. Whatever ideological convictions they possessed, each was willing and able to revise them if it was necessary to preserve British power. Eventually, such naked hypocrisy and opportunism would catch up to both men - in fact, by the end of the First Revolutionary Era, neither would have a future career in politics. But the imprint they left on Britain was also never fully rubbed off.

The outsiders could not rule alone. The 1917 election had given a mandate to the conservatives, who won an absolute majority of seats. Churchill hardly had an iron grip over the party which had just recently invited him into government. He was forced to bring Curzon and Balfour into his “inner circle” to ensure the compliance of the backbenchers. Balancing this out somewhat was the presence of Alred Milner, a Georgist liberal with ambitious plans for imperial reform, and Leo Amery, a tariff reformer and welfarist conservative close to Churchill. These two men were also outsiders and iconoclasts ready to dispense with 19th century political dogmas and unceasingly build up the machinery of the British state.

The Crisis At Home

Britain, more than any other power in the Great War, possessed an enduring constitutional order which purported to guarantee the liberal freedoms of its citizens. When repression was ramped up, it was targeted first and foremost at the colonies. When the homefront began to strain, the state directed its efforts as much as possible through constructive propaganda rather than regressive violence. British Unions were permitted to openly recruit workers and were even included in war planning boards. At times haltingly, England attempted to live up to its liberal heritage.

This was, of course, a double-edged sword. Outright repression of labor action was not wholly avoidable. English unions, like those across continental europe, steadily moved to the left, albeit at a slower rate than in Germany and France. By the time of the November Revolutions, Britain had the highest rate of unionization on earth and a labor leadership that was ready to be finished with the war. The powerful miners and railwaymen unions had decided to affiliate outright with the Independent Labour Party. While this was not an orthodox marxist party, it was more radical than the mainstream Labour Party would ever be.

Nearly every union of note participated in the general strike of November 1919. Like in Germany, France, and Italy, the industrial action occurred organically, without the direction of politicians or union bureaucrats. Both openly insurrectionary and moderate elements of the labor movement participated. However, unlike in much of continental Europe, the union hierarchy gradually reasserted their control over the action and helped set determinate goals. Although nothing like the council movement emerged, there was a proliferation of local “strike committees” that had some role in pressuring the unions. The eventual program adopted for the strike was neither revolutionary nor merely reformist. In good English fashion, it threaded the needle between maximalists and moderates. Yet, in a sign of the radicalization of workers and unions alike, the demands were impossible for the British state to accept.

The most controversial goal of the strike was to end the militarization of society and place Britain once again on a peace-time footing. This meant, first and foremost, the demobilization of the army down to its pre-war strength of 200,000 men, down from the current number of a little over 3 million. This would mean the end of British rule in India and perhaps even the termination of Britain’s status as a world power. It was also an act of solidarity with their European brethren: with the British Army demobilized, the revolutions unfolding across the Central European plain could proceed without outside interference. In addition to this, the unions demanded that wartime wage arbitration boards be made permanent, universal suffrage be instituted, and major industries be nationalized.

Under the terms of the emergency acts, the British military was deputized to provide supplies and work in the factories. Across a swathe of the midlands and the northern industrial belt, however, something closer to an insurgency prevented the resumption of industry. Loyalist soldiers were directed to restore public order, and hundreds of thousands suspected of socialist sympathies were temporarily interned upon their return home.

The Churchill-Lloyd George government practiced a twin strategy of repression and concession. Churchill publicly promised an extension of the suffrage, the expansion of the British welfare state, and a “partial demobilization” of the army while simultaneously passing draconian legislation that permitted the government to engage in a broad-ranging crackdown on worker’s organizations that continued to participate in the strike. Unions were warned to “desist” from their ambitious demands or face official government sanction. The official press organs of the labour party were targeted for their support of the strike.

Such measures would have been unthinkable in peacetime. Churchill only had the political capital to engage in repression of such scale because of the red panic. England had one of the largest and most radical networks of middle-class activist organizations, but almost to a member, these agreed to support the Churchill ministry in this time of “national emergency”. These included groups such as the Union of Democratic Control, which counted amongst its number actual socialists. Those who dissented from these decisions, such as Bertrand Russell, would go into exile in the new socialist states.

Haldane’s liberals adopted an equivocal position, both condemning the strikers and the excesses of Churchill’s response. They tried to position themselves as a “loyal opposition”, and pointedly refused to endorse any “extra-parliamentary” action against the government. Historians still are uncertain whether a more robust Liberal line on the matter would have expedited their eventual return to Whitehall or simply rendered them even more unpopular during the time of emergency.

The crackdown on radical worker militants demoralized many of the smaller unions outside of the “triple alliance” of miners, railwaymen, and transport workers. A devastating blow was struck when Churchill agreed to demobilize two and a half million soldiers. In doing so, the government chose to prioritize the economic recovery and the establishment of social peace over the colonial war abroad. By flooding British cities with demobilized soldiers, a new labor reserve was created that employers could substitute for the strikers. The funds of the unions began to run out by April and the pressure was eased on employers. Of course, the spike in unemployment led to its own form of social unrest, and necessitated additional expansions to police power.

The carrot came along with the stick. Churchill and the liberals passed an election reform bill that extended the suffrage. Under the existing franchise, around 40% of the adult male population was excluded from the vote by wealth and property requirements. The bill granted a number of selective exemptions to these; the male suffrage was expanded from 5.2 million men to a little under nine million. Around 20% of men were thereby given the right to vote. Overwhelmingly, these were voters inclined toward the labour party. To counterbalance the inclusion of an additional section of the working class, an infamous “female suffrage” bill was paired with it. This selectively granted suffrage to around 4.7 million women, predominantly from the upper and upper-middle classes. Not unintentionally, the new electorate was more conservative than the one before it.

The appearance of reform was nonetheless sufficient to quiet some of the already discouraged worker militants. By the middle of the year, not only had the three main labour unions surrendered to their bosses in a feeble attempt to preserve the employment of their workers, but the British economy as a whole had begun recovering at an astonishingly rapid clip. The great irony is that British recovery rested principally on war-time economic decisions adopted under great duress. By floating Sterling and removing itself from the gold standard, the British government allowed itself to spend freely and embark upon an inflationary monetary policy. As American businesses struggled under severe price deflation, Britain was able to jumpstart industry with public money. The resulting depreciation of Sterling hyper-charged the recovery of export industries.

Perhaps most instrumental to British recovery was the parlous position of Britain’s traditional competitors. Over the past half-century, British export industries struggled under the continuous assault of more highly capitalized European and American competitors. In the space of a little under a month, financial crisis and social revolution eliminated the main threats to British manufactures, while the ever-present threat of cheap Japanese goods was obviated by the American blockade. For several years, British manufacturers enjoyed a global position which they had not possessed since the very beginning of the industrial revolution. Lancashire textiles and Midland machine tools once again flooded every corner of the world. The only barrier to even greater industrial expansion was a lack of ready domestic capital; Britain had consumed most of its reserves in the wartime era. This would have to be built back up internally, but for now economic expansion helped to combat the scourge of unemployment, and - perhaps even more importantly - once more endowed the government with a reserve of money to supply the army and placate the masses.

The Crisis Abroad

There was, of course, still a world to be won. Economic recovery at home would mean little if the imperial system shattered. The prime strategic thinker in the Churchill-Lloyd cabinet was Alfred Milner. According to Milner, Britain’s essential strategic dilemma was not substantially different at the end of 1920 than it was over the final years of the Great War, when German troops threatened France. If Paris fell, a eurasian heartland dominated by a German hyper-power would threaten the exposed flanks of Britain’s eastern empire. The battle would inevitably shift from Europe into Africa and South Asia. After German land-power cut the commercial arteries of British Empire in the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal, Britain would lack the means to continue waging war.

Of course, Britain now faced a much greater and more threatening combination of power, a German-Russian hegemony with the capacity to bear down on all the outposts of empire. The frenetic expansion of British territory in the First Revolutionary Era - the extension of a protectorate over Tibet, the formalization of British sovereignty in Constantinople, and the addition of Palestine and Lebanon - must be understood as a response to this perceived threat. The previously informal control which the Empire exercised over its forward outposts had to be bolstered and fortified.

The priority given to this project is a testament to Britain’s faith, perhaps not entirely warranted, that India would return to the fold. Even as the Indian Republican Army streamed into the Central provinces in 1920, tens of thousands of British troops continued to garrison Constantinople and thousands more guarded the new acquisitions of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, many of them sent in to replace mutinying Indian soldiers. That this gamble ultimately proved foresighted should not obscure the fact that it was indeed a gamble.

How did Britain pay for this global war? Even taxes from the ballooning export industries could not meet the full bill. The short answer is that Britain received close to a blank check from its new American financiers. The American government extended additional loans in sterling to Britain, which were then inflated away over the next half-decade. While the Anglo-Indian war was largely viewed as a regrettable necessity by the Americans, the ambitious project of colonial expansion was looked upon with far greater skepticism. Yet America continued to bankroll it.

To many diplomatic historians, this has appeared to be a truly unprecedented situation. America in effect poured money into the British Empire at a time when it was itself in the midst of an economic depression and at war with another major power. Less than a year ago, of course, the two nations had been at the precipice of war over the China issue. It is admittedly difficult to make out precisely how such a policy could be made out to be in the American interest; without it, it is almost certain that American exports would have been more competitive and the American economy recovered more rapidly.

A number of the American diplomats who participated in the Atlantic negotiations have compared the experience to negotiating with a mental patient who has taken themselves hostage. Britain threatened that without an immediate infusion of loans, India and then undoubtedly all of Southeast Asia would fall unceremoniously into the hands of the reds. Britain itself would succumb to social revolution. America would then be forced to foot the bill of paying for a global, unilateral war against the reds. Better to pay up while it was still cheap. The American diplomats, swept up in the mood of popular anti-communism, appeared to buy this argument wholesale. They gave the British astonishingly generous terms and secured astonishingly few concessions. Eventually, British warnings of imminent implosion would be less persuasive, but this ploy would be successful for another few years.

The British pleas were granted credibility by the deteriorating political situation in the dominions. While none of them withdrew from the British system outright, they insisted on a drastic reduction of responsibilities. Britain had no real means to prevent the repatriation of dominion soldiers, as useful they may have been in Constantinople or India. Dominion politicians excused their new stinginess by referencing the domestic political situation. While no genuinely revolutionary governments came to power in the dominions, populist movements did threaten to upend the political order. On the Canadian prairie, for example, a progressive-isolationist farmer’s party attracted enough of the vote to force the Liberals and Conservatives into coalition. In Australia, Labour easily retook power from the conservatives and pursued an independent foreign policy in which closer relations were forged with America. South Africa reeled as gold prices deflated and nearly elected an Afrikaner Republican government. Repairing relations with the dominions would take time.

British power backstopped by American money nonetheless expanded apace. Increasingly, the empire took on a more than merely “British” character. Many aristocratic and colonial elites from France, the Netherlands, and Italy arrived in Britain, preferring it to democratic America. The most significant factor in the “internationalization” of Empire, of course, was the addition of the new “foreign colonies.” The most significant of these was the territory formerly known as the Dutch East Indies. In the pre-war era, this was one of the most profitable possessions on earth, widely admired as a “model colony”. The Dutch royal family left England to form a government-in-exile in Batavia in early 1920. A wave of conservative exiles from the Netherlands followed them. By 1924, around 650,000 white dutchmen lived there, well over double the pre-war population. They were drawn relatively painlessly into the British world-system. Already dependent on British naval power, the Dutch government agreed to accept protectorate status and adopt the pound in return for promises of local autonomy. Similar arrangements existed in French Indochina and Madagascar. These new possessions gave Britain control of over 90% of the world’s rubber production and helped reinforce the Sterling bloc.

A common pattern can be discerned across Britain’s economic and imperial recovery. Despite internal British weakness, the exhaustion and disarray of its main competitors permitted it to consolidate its power and extend its influence. Britain’s centrality in the capitalist world-system meant that America felt obliged to prop up its finances to slow down the global revolutionary wave. British flexibility and naval power gave local colonial elites incentive to bargain with and join the British system. Somehow, the imperium emerged from the decade of war not only intact, but enlarged, though it would now have to share the stage with the world’s three other great powers.

Political Change and Renewal

Whatever the extent of domestic repression, Parliament would remain in session, a testament to English liberty - or, depending upon one’s perspective, the illusion of it. Once the strike was put down, the public soured on the anti-bolshevik crusade quicker than it did the anti-German one. While a broad consensus emerged in defense of retaking the colonies, there were already in 1921 growing calls for more of the army to be demobilized. A new brand of literature, quite popular with the liberals, accused Churchill of constructing a “totalitarian” military state along the same lines as the Soviets. Sporadic protests, largely middle-class in character, continued to erupt against rationing.

By this point, the main opposition force to the government was J.B.S. Haldane’s liberals. Macdonald’s Labour Party had attached its fate to that of the strike; in doing so, they had incurred the wrath of both their middle-class liberal coalition partners and the state. Their parlous political situation in the last three years of the First Revolutionary Era is demonstrated by their abysmal performance in most by-elections. Haldane’s liberals, on the other hand, were at last beginning to win back some of the support lost during the general strike. Their decision to sit in opposition since the very beginning of the war was once dismissed as unpatriotic, but many now believed it to be prophetic. Perhaps if the entire liberal party had joined them the current era of bloodletting would never have begun.

The anti-georgist liberals were hardly a unified ideological camp. On the right were the followers of the previous prime minister H.H. Asquith: free-trade, reforming liberals whose principal opposition to the conservatives and georgists was the ballooning size of government under their rule. They were as liable as any to react with horror to the spread of bolshevism. While they once controlled the liberal party, they were now a dying breed: the new world did not align with 19th century liberal pieties. British industry had benefited from protectionism, and the new military industries and state bureaucracy was here to stay. There would be no returning to the politics of yesteryear.

In the new centre of the liberals sat its new leader, Richard Haldane. He was a perhaps unlikely figure to lead a major party. Born in Edinburgh, he came from a religious family, and was one of the few party leaders educated outside the Oxbridge system. He attended the Edinburgh Academy, the University of Gottingen in Germany, and then the University of Edinburgh, where he completed an MA degree in philosophy. He was offered a place at Balliol College, Oxford, the center of ethical-reformist British neo-hegelianism, but decided instead to pursue politics and law. After winning election to parliament in 1880, he became a key ally of Edward Grey and H.H. Asquith. Although closely acquainted with the leading figures of the Fabian socialists, he maintained a distance from their politics. Their influence could perhaps be seen in his vociferous defense of Lloyd George’s welfarist People’s Budget.

When war in Europe broke out, most who knew him expected Haldane to rally to France’s defense. He had been instrumental in reforming the army and preparing it for a possible continental intervention. Though rumours proliferated that he was a secret Germanophile due to his dalliance with the idealists and connections with German businessmen, in reality he had little desire to see Germany supplant Britain as the leading world-imperial power. During the July crisis, Haldane favored attempting to diplomatically de-escalate the situation, but he also urged Asquith to mobilize the army in case the worst came to worst. When war finally did break out, however, he was determined to wash his hands of it. The Serbian atrocities in Albania still weighed on his mind, and there was not much of a place for him in a government without Asquith.

Asquith himself was an exhausted and beaten man who regretted his own betrayal of “liberal ideals” during the July crisis. Leadership of the party slowly passed to the philosopher-politician. Compared to Asquith, Haldane represented a more radical, populist, and aggressively reforming liberalism. There were more than a few similarities between his politics and that of Lloyd George. The key distinction separating the Georgists and the opposition liberals thus quickly became war policy. Faced with an overwhelming surge of patriotic sentiment, Haldane initially did not criticize the war itself, but the government’s prosecution of it. He advocated for Britain to act as it did in the Napoleonic wars: financing its allies, blockading its opponents, and securing the sea-lanes of Empire and its vital chokepoints. He gained a loyal following among the anti-conscription radicals, men such as Leif Jones, William Llewelyn Williams, R.D. Denman, and Joseph King.

Haldane’s opposition to the “totalizing measures” of the government also won him support amongst the noncomformist middle-classes and parts of the working-class still not aligned with the labour party, but it also precluded his opposition liberals from serving in a wartime ministry. The 1917 election delivered a mixed verdict on this political strategy: on the one hand, Haldane’s liberals eclipsed those of Lloyd George’s, and his faction won the overwhelming majority of seats in which the two two contenders were liberals. On the other hand, both liberal factions together won a paltry 37% of the vote, their worst showing in British history.

1917 British Parliamentary Election
​

Party	Party Leader	Vote	%	Seats Before	Seats Won	Change
Conservative	Bonar Law	1,703,812	43	271	368	+97
Liberal	David Lloyd George	551,975	14	150	74	-76
Labour	William Adamson	394,255	10	42	51	+9
Independent Liberal	Richard Haldane	906,786	23	122	94	-28
Sinn Fein	Eamon de Valera	173,472	4.4	New Party	70	+70
Irish Parliamentary	John Redmond	105,506	2.6	74	10	-64

The relative growth of the “Independent Liberals” did permit Haldane to become the de facto leader of the party as a whole. Leading newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette and The Nation began referring to Lloyd George’s followers as “Georgists” or “Coalition Liberals” and his opponents as simply “Liberals”. The decline of George’s parliamentary clout meant that he could now be excluded entirely from government. For a few years, under the Bonar Law ministry, George joined the backbenchers, though his organizational skills and work ethic were sorely missed even by many conservatives. Even while out of government, Whitehall frequently consulted him. When Churchill finally came to power in 1919, he invited the Georgists both for their deep knowledge of the new state bureaucracy and as a counterbalance to the more traditionalist conservatives.

During the course of the First Revolutionary Era, the liberals grew more, rather than less ideologically heterogeneous, serving as a big-tent party for all who opposed Churchill and George’s governance. Complaints included “overweening colonial expansionism”, “the erosion of English liberties”, the “metastasis of the state”, and the “destruction of England’s finances”. A significant “patriotic” section of the Labour party joined them in 1920. The prominence of many leading Liberals made it difficult for the government to suppress their primary organs of dissent.

The revived Liberal Party would soon find the Churchill-George coalition shoveling political capital into their hands. The oppositional press, which had remained dutifully quiet in 1920, burst into action after the initial threat of a socialist takeover dissipated. Despite America’s more explicit “constitutional” commitment to free speech, English civil society remained far more active and censorship much more narrow. Attempts to expand it during the First Revolutionary Era were met with elite outrage. The Manchester Guardian, once a solid ally of George, became the main organ of the opposition and unearthed scandal after scandal. The first came in April 1922, when it was revealed that Britain had conspired with the Turkish archenemy to suppress an Arab revolt in the Levant. Troops ostensibly positioned to guard against a Turkish attack into Egypt had, in fact, been primarily stationed in the area to suppress Arab nationalism in Palestine and Lebanon. Luckily, the anti-british local notables could never quite manage to cooperate fully with the restless Fellahin. Another report later that month demonstrated that British officials had wide-ranging knowledge of Greek atrocities being committed against Turkish civilians, and had acted to hide such information from the British population. Dismissals of junior officials followed, but the scandals did not. A number of documents published in August, related to ongoing peasant unrest in Burma, purported to show that the Churchill government had refused to negotiate with the eminently reasonable demands of the local elite and thereby been forced to station additional troops in the area.

The most shocking revelations arrived in September. Junior government ministers in the India ministry wrote an open letter, published in several leading newspapers, which accused the government of ignoring their counsel and pursuing an overly intransigent policy during the first weeks of the First Revolutionary Era. The present Anglo-Indian war, they suggested, may have been avoided. A parliamentary inquiry and the resignation of several cabinet members soon followed.

The Irish issue also haunted the conservatives. In 1922, a treaty was signed granting Ireland dominion status after two and a half years of war. Yet almost immediately, civil war broke out between the various Irish Republicans. Assisted by Dutch and German arms smugglers, “Anti-treaty” forces dominated by red militias quickly gained the upper hand. Dublin once again was lost, and Britain was forced to divert soldiers to the theater once again to shore up the position of the pro-treaty forces. Once more, accusations were levelled that conservative intransigence and bellicosity had needlessly increased the costs of empire and inflamed socialist radicalism. Liberals denounced Churchill - and now George - as the unwitting allies of the reds.

Under increasing pressure from within his own ranks, Lloyd George finally stepped down from the Churchill ministry in early 1923, bringing his dwindling group of supporters back into Haldane’s camp. The enlarged opposition liberals began agitating for elections. Under the emergency act passed after the November Revolutions, the government was not obligated to call them until the end of Britain’s imperial crisis. Although the reds raced across Europe in 1923, liberals argued that with victory in the Anglo-Indian War and the settlement of the Irish conflict, the time had arrived for Britain’s first elections in over six years. Churchill’s hold on power wavered as conservatives worried that keeping him as prime minister for any longer would do permanent harm to the party’s reputation. The dam finally broke when news leaked of British support for Roman Dmowski and the details of the Jewish ethnocide became undeniable. The Jewish-British conservative Leo Amery, one of Church’s closest allies and a thus far quiet skeptic of his Balkan Policy, left the government and called for Churchill’s resignation. Leading Jewish Tories such as Lionel Rothschild and Philip Magnus soon joined him. Fifty-eight conservatives combined with all of the liberals to demand elections, and in December they repealed the emergency act. Churchill vowed to stay on until elections were held. A no-confidence vote narrowly failed, with more than twenty conservatives defecting.

1924 British Parliamentary Election ​

Party	Party Leader	Vote	%	Seats Before	Seats Won	Change
Conservative	Winston Churchill	2,822,714	31	368	186	-182
Liberal	Richard Haldane	4,370,654	48	168	398	+230
Labour	Ramsay Macdonald	1,730,050	19	42	83	+41

The scale of the drubbing became clear as soon as election results came in. The 17-point victory margin was the largest since Gladstone’s first victory in 1868. Privately, conservatives found some reasons for optimism. Haldane had campaigned on a widely popular platform of imperial retrenchment and peace-making, and yet still failed to reach a majority of the vote. A predicted surge in support for Labour largely failed to materialize; many of its core voters were still discouraged from the events of 1920. Churchill directly lost his seat, absolving the party of a potentially ruinous leadership fight, and the various factions of the liberals had already begun squabbling over the apportionment of cabinet ministries. Conservative strength in Southern England and the failure of the Liberals and Labour to reach an electoral pact also permitted them to hold onto an unexpectedly large number of seats.

While the conservatives searched for silver linings, the Liberals celebrated. Haldane had an ambitious reform agenda to implement: this included a further expansion of the suffrage, the extension of welfare measures, and, most crucially, a program to devolve more autonomy to the colonies and reduce the costs of Empire. Echoing the lines of Milton’s Areopagitica , Haldane spoke before Parliament on January 21st. Not a natural orator, he delivered the speech rather awkwardly, but it nonetheless received thunderous applause from England’s new governing party:

_“People of England! Consider the nation of which you are part, and which you have entrusted us to govern: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, eager to invent and to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that human capacity may soar to. Why else was this nation chosen before that of any other to sound forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe? Behold now this vast city: a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war does not have more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defense of truth, then there be pens and heads, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas to meet the challenges of this new world.

And if the prior government of this nation has attempted to wind up the activity of our minds and dim the torch of liberty, we now signal our intention to release it from its self-imposed bondage, to bring to this nation a liberty which will be at home in our brave new world. The tide of despotism which has swept over Europe shall not be permitted entrance to these shores! Never shall this nation’s parliament become a foreign and a Prussian beast, unshackled from the rightful demands of Britain’s people. No longer shall we lower ourselves to alliance with petty tyrants and oppressors, no more shall we besmirch the name of Britain with the crimes and outrages of men who have no love of English liberty. Our island’s security, and the perpetuity of this great empire, will only be fully achieved once honor and good sense are restored to the administration of this government. I ask that you grant me your faith and support as I embark on these tasks. This may be a trying time for this empire; demagogy and madness have overtaken Europe, and many have begun to doubt the creed of liberty. Yet I am without doubt that, as it has countless times before, this great nation will persist through all challenges, and that the English race shall endure.” _