to enact so revolutionary a measure upon so remote a subject. For a time, indeed, the enforcement of the law was seriously obstructed. Thousands of Nonconformists refused to pay the rates from which the denominational schools were to be supported, only to have their property sold by the public authorities to satisfy the obligation. More than seventy thousand were summoned to court, and many were imprisoned. In time, the furor died down. But the question kept an uppermost place in politics, from which it was hardly ousted even by Mr. Chamberlain's tariff proposals; and the feeling aroused on it became one of the principal causes of the overwhelming defeat of the Unionist party at the parliamentary elections of 1906.

The Liberals came into power thoroughly committed to the Nonconformist cause, and one of the first great pieces of legislation which they sought to carry through Parliament was a measure calculated to undenominationalize, although not altogether to secularize, popular elementary education. The bill, introduced April 9, 1906, by Mr. Augustine Birrell, president of the Board of Education, stipulated, in the main (1) that after January 1, 1908, only such schools as were established, supported, and controlled by the local authorities should be recognized as public schools with a claim upon public funds, national or local; (2) that after the date mentioned no religious tests should be required of teachers in any public school; and (3) that while denominational religious instruction for those who should desire it might be given two mornings a week in the denominational schools taken over by the local authorities, such instruction should be given by persons other than the regular teachers, and not at public expense. The objects of the bill were, obviously, to place under public management all elementary schools aided from public funds, to provide an undenominational school within the reach of every child, to free teachers from religious tests, and yet at the same time, as a matter of compromise, to permit some denominational religious teaching in schools in which it hitherto had existed.

Despite the opposition of the Anglicans, who said that the measure proposed a virtual confiscation of the denominational schools, the bill passed the House of Commons by a large majority, in June, 1906. In the House of Lords the opposition was in full command; and although the measure was passed by a substantial majority, it was fundamentally changed for example, so as to compel instruction in religion, presumably in the tenets of the Established Church. The lower house re

jected the Lords' amendments by a heavy majority, and the Government, declaring compromise impossible, withdrew the bill. At least three other measures on the subject, sponsored by the Board of Education, appeared later; but no one of them ever got beyond the committee stage, and the act of 1902 continued in operation without important change until the Great War. After 1909 the issue fell somewhat into the background, while others the reform of taxation, Home Rule, woman suffrage, the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, and the regulation of the liquor trade were pushed to the fore. The problem, however, had not been solved; the factors in it remained practically unchanged; and when the situation again became favorable, sharp controversy upon it was likely to be resumed. The war led to anxious inquiry into the workings and the results of the educational machinery, and in 1918 an extremely important Education Act was passed with a view to toning up the entire system. Some changes were made in the duties of the local education authorities and in the distribution of government grants. The fundamental issue between state-controlled and denomination-controlled education was not, however, removed, and the question still invites to party controversy.1

1 The educational system and the principal questions concerning it are clearly described in Lowell, Government of England, II, Chaps. xlvii-l. Historical treatises include G. Balfour, Educational Systems in Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 1898); H. Holman, English National Education (London, 1898); and J. E. G. Montmorency, The Progress of Education in England (London, 1904). The religious controversy is reviewed in May and Holland, Constitutional History, III, Chap. iv. Wartime legislation is described in A. A. Thomas, The Education Act of 1918 (London, 1919), and there is a synopsis in U. S. Monthly Labor Rev., Dec., 1918.

CHAPTER XVIII

PARTY POLITICS SINCE 1914

Parties and the Great War. War can usually be counted on to produce important changes in political parties and party alignments. New or dormant issues are brought to the fore; men are forced into unaccustomed relations, which alter their ways of thinking and their habits of action; and even if, as is sometimes true, public sentiment is roused, in the face of a sudden external danger, to demand a complete cessation of party contests that is to say, a party truce in the end there is apt to be an intensification, rather than otherwise, of party spirit and party activity. The experience of Great Britain since 1914 has run in these general lines; and it is the purpose of the present chapter to point out the salient features of this experience and to describe briefly the post bellum state of parties, as far as it could be determined some eighteen months after the armistice.

The party situation at the outbreak of the war has been described elsewhere,' and the major facts can be restated in a few words. The Liberals were in power, and Mr. Asquith was prime minister, although the party's adherents scarcely outnumbered the Unionists in the House of Commons, and the premier and his colleagues clung to office only with the aid of the Irish Nationalists and the Laborites. Acting under the provisions of the Parliament Act, the Liberals were about to place on the statute book a number of highly contentious measures to which they had long been devoted, notably Home Rule for Ireland, disestablishment of the Church in Wales, and the abolition of plural voting. The Liberal policy inclined strongly, furthermore, to ameliorative social legislation; the Government had in hand, at the moment when the war broke out, a minimum wage bill for agricultural laborers. A general election was not more than fifteen months distant, and the results of by-elections, confirmed by other evidences, indicated that the Unionists had so far regained the confidence of the country that they would be in a position to go into the contest with a fair chance of winning. Ireland was on the

1 See pp. 257-259.

brink of civil war over the terms of the Home Rule Bill; the militant woman suffragists were again openly defying the authorities; organized labor was uncommonly restless, and even public employees were striking-in short, politics was at the boiling point and the entire aspect of public affairs was almost unprecedentedly troubled. Small wonder that the German war lords, intently calculating the possibilities of an international conflagration on the continent, came to the comfortable conclusion that Britain's internal condition would not permit her, even if she were so minded, to become a participant in the contest.

The ease and speed with which the United Kingdom pulled itself together, dropped its domestic quarrels, and turned its full strength to the business of war surprised not only the Germans but the world generally. Such action could be made possible, of course, only by a cessation of party strife; and the capital fact of the war period proper, so far as political history goes, is the suspension of party activity, just as the prime political interest of the years following the armistice became the revival of party life and the struggle of old and new party forces for dominance. On July 30, 1914-five days before Britain entered the war the premier, having conferred with the leader of the Opposition, and with other men outside his own party, voiced in a solemn speech in the House of Commons the feeling of all groups that it was of vital importance that the country should be able to speak and act in the crisis "with the authority of an undivided nation"; and when the die was definitely cast for war, a formal truce was entered into by the party leaders, to be binding as long as the contest should last. Contentious domestic questions were to be shelved; adherents of all parties were to work together in Parliament for the country's well-being in the emergency, without consideration for or prejudice to their party standing; no party was to try, at a by-election, to wrest a seat from the party to which it "belonged."

The Government's decision for war was supported by all parties except the Independent Laborites;1 and all-even the group mentioned eventually subscribed to the truce. Rupture was threatened when, at the middle of September, the premier announced that the Home Rule Bill and the Welsh Disestablishment Bill would be put on the statute book forthwith, accom

1 Certain individual leaders demurred. Thus, Lord Morley and John Burns resigned from the cabinet, and Ramsay Macdonald surrendered the chairmanship of the parliamentary Labor party, rather than countenance the Government's decision.

panied by measures suspending them for twelve months or until the termination of the war. In the course of a particularly stormy session the Unionist members of the House of Commons, indeed, withdrew from the chamber in a body as a protest against the Government's "indecent violation of its pledge."1 This recrudescence of domestic strife, however, roused keen public resentment, and, the Irish and Welsh questions having been disposed of as the Government desired, all elements turned again to the tasks imposed by the war.

It was illogical — at all events under the English system that a government composed of members of a single party should require and receive the support of the adherents of rival parties through a long and indefinite period. Only war could have made the arrangement possible for even a short time; yet the very fact of war demanded a broader basis for the exercise of public authority. The adoption of the coalition principle, in May, 1915, was therefore inevitable. The Liberal premier remained at the helm, but the positions of chief responsibility in the ministry were apportioned not very unequally between Liberals and Unionists, with also some representation of Labor. The new cabinet consisted of twelve Liberals, eight Unionists, and one Labor member, besides Lord Kitchener, who was not a party man. Liberals, Unionists, and Laborites together formed eighty-eight per cent of the membership of the House of Commons; so that, for all practical purposes, Government and Opposition were merged in one homogeneous body. Party activity was reduced to a minimum, both in Parliament and outside.

The history and character of the coalition under Mr. Asquith, and of the coalition and war cabinet under Mr. Lloyd George, have been dealt with elsewhere.2 It must suffice to note here merely that dissolution of the alliance was many times threatened and barely prevented; that there were numerous resignations of individual ministers; that after the reorganization of the ministry by Lloyd George in December, 1916, the most important posts-aside from the premiership-passed into the hands of Unionists; that Unionism steadily strengthened its hold upon, not only the government, but the country at large; that in 191718 a formal Opposition once more appeared in the House of Commons, led by ex-Premier Asquith; that from the summer of 1918 Labor also went its own way; and that by the date of the armistice the country was again the scene of party strife almost as 1 London Times (Weekly ed.), Sept. 18, 1914, p. 741. 2 See pp. 106-111.