The Adventure of Living | Page 8

Townsend had gone away for his usual summer holiday, and
that he wanted someone to come and help him by writing a couple of
leaders a week and some of the notes. I, of course, was delighted at the
prospect, for my mind was full of politics and I was longing to have my
say. Here again, though it did not consciously occur to me that I was in
for anything big, I seem to have had some sort of subconscious
premonition. At any rate, I accepted with delight and well remember
my talk at the office before taking up my duties. My editor explained to
me that Mr. Asquith, who had been up till the end of 1885 the writer of
a weekly leader in The Spectator and also a holiday writer, had now
severed his connection with the paper, owing to his entry into active
politics. It did not occur to me, however, that I was likely to get the
post of regular leader-writer in his stead, though this was what actually
happened.
I left the office, I remember, greatly pleased with the two subjects upon
which I was to write. The first article was to be an exhortation to the
Conservative side of the Unionist Party not to be led into thinking that
they were necessarily a minority in the country and that they could not
expect any but a minute fraction of working-men to be on their side.
With all the daring of twenty-six I set out to teach the Conservative
party their business. This is how I began my article which appeared on
the 24th of July, 1886.
In their hearts the Conservatives cannot really believe that anyone with
less than £100 a year willingly votes on their side. A victory in a
popular constituency always astonishes them. They cannot restrain a
feeling that by all the rules of reason and logic they ought to have lost.
What inducement, they wonder, can the working-men have to vote for
them? Lord Beaconsfield, of course, never shared such notions as
these.... Yet his party never sincerely believed what he told them, and
only followed him because they saw no other escape from their
difficulties. The last extension of the franchise has again shown that he
was right, and that in no conditions of life do Englishmen vote as a
herd.
Here is how I ended it:

Conciliation or Coercion was the cry everywhere. And yet the majority
of the new voters, to their eternal honour, proved their political infancy
so full of sense and patriotism that they let go by unheeded the appeals
to their class-prejudices and to their emotions, and chose, instead, the
harder and seemingly less generous policy, based on reason rather than
on sentiment, on conviction rather than on despair. As the trial was
severe, so is the honour due to the new voters lasting and conspicuous.
The length of the quotation is justified by its effect on--my life. For me
it has another interest. In re-reading it, I note that, right or wrong, it
takes exactly the view of the English democracy which I have always
taken and which I hold today as strongly as I did forty years ago.
The article had an instant reaction. It delighted Mr. Townsend, who,
though he did not know it was by me, guessed that it was mine, and
wrote at once to ask me whether, when Mr. Hutton went on his holiday,
I could remain at work as his assistant. Very soon after, he suggested,
with a swift generosity that still warms my heart, that if I liked to give
up the Bar, for which I was still supposing myself to be reading, I could
have a permanent place at _The Spectator_, and even, if I remember
rightly, hinted that I might look forward to succeeding the first of the
two partners who died or retired, and so to becoming joint editor or
joint proprietor. That prospect I do admit took away my breath. With
the solemn caution of youth, or at any rate with youth's delight in irony
in action, I almost felt that I should have to go and make
representations to my chief about his juvenile impetuosity and want of
care and prudence. Surely he must see that he had not had enough
experience of me yet to make so large a proposition, that it was absurd,
and so forth. _O sancta simplicitas!_

CHAPTER II
HOW I CAME TO "THE SPECTATOR" (_Continued_)
Even the success chronicled in the preceding chapter did not exhaust
the store of good luck destined for my first appearance as a political

leader-writer. Fate again showed its determination to force me upon
The Spectator. When I arrived at the office on the Tuesday morning
following the publication of the