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that the change is in the parties and not in Joseph of Birmingham. The Tories have come to me, I have not gone towards them. And who is there who would be. so hide-bound in party pedantry as to refuse the use of a political opponent when that political opponent has come over to your side? Turncoat you call me, and why? Because I have converted the Tories to the principles of Birmingham Radicalism. You doubt it, do you? What, then, do you think of Free Education? How long is it since this was regarded, even by Liberals of the Gladstonian stripe, as a Socialist heresy? But who carried it? The Tory Government. And why did they carry it? Because they had been permeated by the influence of the Birmingham school. As it was with Free Education, so it is with County Councils, with allotments, and all the rest of their social legislation. The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it, and the best way of testing whether the change is in the party or the person is to compare their respective programmes, say, in 1880 and in 1895, and see whether it is the party that has approximated to the person or the person to the party."

PROGRAMME-MAKER IN ORDINARY.

"Programmes, forsooth!" sneers the Gladstonian. "Mr. Chamberlain is always making programmes." 'Certainly," replies Mr. Chamberlain; "it is my destiny to mark

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Mr. Chamberlain, placid and unperturbed, smiles benignly upon his questioner. "Home Rule?-yes, of course I was, and am all for Home Rule, properly understood. Why, I am the original patentee of Home Rule. Did I not sit at the Round Table Conference which almost agreed to recommend my scheme? I am for the Union, of course, always was and always will be. My Home

IN APRIL, 1880. out the tasks which the political (Frem a photograph by II. J. Whitlock, Birmingham.) parties have to accomplish. No one

authorises my programmes. They are my very, very own, all born from one brain under the fertilising influence of one great thought. But although no one will authorise them, both parties make haste to execute them. And whether is it nobler to be the framer of the plan of campaign, or merely to be one of the rank and file who march and countermarch in obedience to the orders drawn up long before in the tent of the Commander-in-Chief?"

As

To the law and to the testimony! What are the facts? Mr. Chamberlain drew up before 1880 the Radical programme, with its manifold F's-Free Church, Free Land, Free Labour and Free Schools. In 1885 he published the unauthorised programme of the Liberal party, which converted the defeat begun in the towns into a brilliant victory in the country districts. Mr. Labouchere put it-"His three acres and a cow romped in." Now again he has launched a programme, this time for the Unionist party. What else is there left him to do? Excepting the Home Rule party, he has fitted all the parties with programmes. And who can deny that they are not good programmes, all stamped with "J. C., his mark"? And in every programme is not the same dominant motive visible?-to improve the common lot of the common people. That is the key to all that is mysterious, the clue to all that is labyrinthine in the working of Mr. Chamberlain's apparently tortuous career.

TO-DAY AS YESTERDAY THE SAME.

"But," objects the scandalised Radical, "what about Home Rule, about the Peers, about the Church?" But

Rule is not antagonistic to the
Union. And, mark my words, my
Home Rule will settle the Irish
question yet. No doubt about that.
What are its distinctive character-
istics? First, it must not be called
Home Rule-a rose by any other
name would sinell as sweet. There-
fore it must be an Irish Local
Government Bill. Secondly, it must
be framed and carried by a Con-
servative Administration, because no
other can get Home Rule through
the House of Lords. All other
details are immaterial."

THE PAUL OF 1895 AND THE SAUL
OF 1885.

Then, as to the House of Lords, Mr. Chamberlain has summed up handsomely the shortcomings of the old reactionary Chamber. Liberals hungry for a good phrase and a mouth-filling sentence, quote eagerly his invectives of 1885. Mr. Chamberlain has not a word to alter or erase. The old House of Peers was all that he said it was; but a House of Peers that prostrates itself before the chariot of Social Reconstruction; a House of Peers that is an inviolable bulwark against his Liberal enemies; a House of Peers that is no longer reactionary, but regenerate; a House of Peers that has found salvation, and a House of Peers that only waits to register the conclusions Mr Chamberlain may arrive at as to the reform which its own constitution should undergohow can such a House be confounded with the House against which Mr. Chamberlain hurled his mighty anathemas? Why, you might as well denounce the Apostle Paul for hostility to Christianity, because one Saul held the clothes of those who stoned Stephen! Paul changed his name as well as his nature; unfortunately the Peers, although regenerate, have not found a new name to show that they have a new heart. But Mr. Chamberlain knows, and Mr. Chamberlain is content.

THE NONCONFORMIST SAVIOUR OF STATE CHURCHES.

Finally, there is the question of the Church. Here Mr. Chamberlain is quite frank with himself. No man is less of a Churchman than he; he is secular to the fingertips. His religious connections, such as they are, are Unitarian, that is to say, he is by birth and temperament a member of the most nonconforming of all the Nonconformist bodies. In principle, in creed, in everything, he is an antagonist of the Anglican State Establishment. In his younger days Mr. Chamberlain used to go down to Wales and elsewhere, and make such fervent speeches on Anti-State Church lines as would have done credit to any fervent gospeller among them all. Why, it is even as if he were altogether such a man as Henry Richard or Samuel Morley," was the amazed remark of an incredulous listener. But I am altogether such a man as Henry

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Richard," was Mr. Chamberlain's reply. How then comes it that he is a mainstay and pillar of strength for a Cabinet whose mandate is to rescue the State Churches of Wales and of Scotland from disestablishment and disendowment?

IS THIS PARIS NOT WORTH THIS MASS?

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I have not heard Mr. Chamberlain's answer, for when we talked, if I had suggested such an evolution as being in store for him, he would have replied, "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" so vehement a Liberationist was he only ten years ago. But it is not difficult to see how he can reconcile his present action with his unchanged and unchanging devotion to Nonconformist Anti-State Church principles. From an abstract point of view, no doubt he agrees with the Welsh Nonconformists in thinking that the Establishment of the Anglican Church, with its miserable minority of adherents, is bad for the Church, unjust to the Nonconformists, and utterly indefensible. But as Henri Quatre said long ago, Paris is well worth a mass;" so our Henri Quatre of Birmingham, with his mind full of the need for the pullet in every poor man's pot, deliberately decides that social reconstruction is worth a temporary postponement of Welsh Disestablishment. After all, nothing that he could do or say would bring Disestablishment one whit nearer. To parade abstract principles about Establishment to which it is absolutely impossible to give any effect may minister to a harmless vanity; it is not an act worthy of a statesman. And a statesman, nay, rather a schoolmaster of statesmen, is Mr. Chamberlain. To place a pious opinion upon the shelf, that is the price for the immediate effective alliance with a party that in return is willing to put all its other cherished principles on the shelf and to set to work to place on the Statute Book the measures defined in the Birmingham programme. There are times and seasons for all things. Disestablishment can wait. There is no inconsistency in rearranging the order of precedence according to the altered circumstances of an altered time.

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OUR ONLY ABDIEL.

So Mr. Chamberlain with gaiety of heart laughs away the vehement invective of his quondam allies. He is wiser than they, wiser and more far-seeing, that is

all. He can appreciate the relative value of competing reforms-as indeed it is his nature to. Towards his assailants he can but have one sentiment profound pity and a constantly renewed wonder. For how comes it

sentiment-pro

that Englishmen can actually be so slow of heart and blind of eye as not to see the transparent integrity of

his every action and the fidelity as of an Abdiel with which he has abided by his convictions?

This may not appear quite historical to our readers. I think it is more historical in one respect than much that passes for history. For it is in this fashion and in no other that recent history mirrors itself in the mind of one of those who have done most to make it.

I am afraid that some of my readers will be inclined to think that the foregoing pages have been "wrote sarcastic." Therein they will make a mistake. They represent a well-meant and painstaking effort to indicate in outline how Mr. Chamberlain appears in the eyes of Mr. Chamberlain. If I had the tongues of men and of angels, I might be able to do adequate justice to that theme; but having only one tongue, and that of a man and not of an angel, I feel unequal to the task. But after all, there is more in Mr. Chamberlain's own estimate of himself than most of our Liberal friends were at one time willing to admit.

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From "A Chamberlain Picture Book."

II. HIS ANCESTORS AND PARTNERS. One of the interesting things of the present political combination is the fact that Mr. Chamberlain, a Unitarian, should be sitting cheek by jowl with Lord Salisbury, the elect of the High Anglicans, to whom Dissenters are an abomination, and Unitarians little better than blank infidels. At this moment there are doubtless many searchings of heart in country rectories when they reflect upon the text "Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers," for what fellowship have the truc-blue Tories and the high-flying Anglicans with the Nonconformist who is not even a Trinitarian? They will probably take consolation to their souls from the thought that no doubt it is well to have even a Unitarian as a bulwark for a State Church.

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A BUTTRESS, NOT A PILLAR.

Lord Eldon used to declare, with frequent profanity, that he was a buttress, not a pillar of the Church, as he supported from the outside a building which he never entered. Mr. Chamberlain, who, although not so profane, is much more heterodox, may be a valuable buttress to the somewhat shaky edifice of the Church establishment. Samson was a very terrible fellow when his hair was long and his strength intact, but none of the wholesale massacres which he had wrought among the sons of Philistia prevented them finding him a very handy man to grind corn when he was their captive. The comparison is, however, not exactly reassuring for the Tories, for Samson when his hair had grown again proved himself capable of pulling down the whole of the Temple about their ears. Absit omen!

HIS NONCONFORMIST ANCESTORS.

Allusion has already been male to Mr. Chamberlain's pride in his Nonconformity. On one famous occasion he descended upon Wales clad in all the glories of hereditary Nonconformity, and made a speech which he declared exactly expressed his inmost convictions. The passage in his Denbigh speech has not been trotted out much at the recent election. This is a pity, for it is a very good passage, and brings into clear relief the contrast between

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Mr. Joseph Chamberlain of 1884 and 1895. This is how it was reported in the morning papers :

I have no spite against the House of Lords; but as a Dissenter (loud and prolonged cheering)-as a Dissenter(renewed cheering)-I have an account to settle with them, and I promise you I will not forget the reckoning. (Loud cheers.) I boast a descent of which I am as proud as any baron may be of the title which he owes to the smile of a king or to the favour of a king's mistress, for I can claim descent from one of the 2,000 ejected ministers who, in the time of the Stuarts, left home and work and profit rather than accept the State-made creed which it was sought to force upon them, and for that reason, if no other, I share your hopes and your aspirations, and I resent the insults, the injuries, and the injustice from which you have suffered so long at the hands of a privileged assembly. (Cheers.) But the cup is nearly full. (Renewed cheers.) The career of high-handed wrong is coming to an end. (Prolonged cheers.) The House of Lords have alienated Ireland, they have oppressed the Dissenters, and they now oppose the enfranchisement of the people. We have been too long a peer-ridden nation-(loud cheers)—and I hope you will say to them if they will not bow to the mandate of the people, that they shall lose for ever the authority which they have so long abused. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)

THE SAINT OF THE FAMILY.

This allusion to his having been born in the Puritan purple shows how strong the sentiment of family is with Mr. Chamberlain. It extends backwards and forwards, and all round. To be related to Mr. Chamberlain is a great and fearful privilege, and profitable withal, as several members of the Chamberlain gens have found out in the recent distribution of Ministerial offices. The ancestor to whom he referred to in his Denbigh speech was the Rev. Richard Sergeant. Mr. Sergeant was a fellow labourer with Richard Baxter at Kidderminster. The author of "The Saint's Everlasting Rest," in his autobiography, pays emphatic tribute to the manifold worth, the remarkable self-devotion, and the singular sanctity of this admirable ancestor who, on his decease, seems to have left all his virtues in direct descent to the present Secretary for the Colonies. Mr. Sergeant began his ministry at Kidderminster two years after the Battle of Naseby, and from 1656 to 1662 he held the living of Stoke, near Kidderminster. But in that black year he was ejected by the Act of Uniformity. He contrived, however, to survive the dynasty which had deprived him of his living, for he did not die until eight years after the glorious revolution of 1688. The Whigs sent the Stuarts packing, but unfortunately they did not repeal the Act of Uniformity, which continues to this day as a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to all those who wish to see the English Church really national, and not a mere Anglican sect.

PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S CRITICISMS.

This reference by Mr. Chamberlain to his Puritan ancestor was made use of in a curious way ten years ago by Professor Tyndall, who at that moment was carrying on a furious controversy with Mr. Chamberlain concerning lighthouse illuminants:

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Mr. Chamberlain," said Professor Tyndall, "has recently indulged in some ancestral references. Permit me to follow his example. It is said that I am distantly connected with one William Tyndale, who was rash enough to boast and make good his boast that he would place an open Bible within the reach of every ploughboy in England. His first reward was exile, and then a subterranean cell in the Castle of Vilvorden. It was a cold cell, and he humbly but vainly prayed for his coat to cover him and for his books to occupy him. In due time he was taken from his cell and set upright against a post. Round neck and post was placed a chain, which being cunningly twisted, the life was squeezed out of him. A bonfire

was made of his body afterwards. Thus, as regards suffering for righteousness' sake, my reputed ancestral relation is ut least on a par with Mr. Chamberlain's."

He then went on to point out that William Tyndale's descendant was suffering evil things at the hands of Richard Sergeant's heir: the suggestion being that Mr. Chamberlain, who was then President of the Board of Trade, was treating Professor Tyndall almost as badly as William Tyndale had been treated in the days of old. There is no need to go into the details of that discussion, further than to glean from the newspaper files of the day one delicious sentence in which Professor Tyndall describes Mr. Chamberlain's method of dealing with the truth. After criticising Mr. Chamberlain's statement as flimsy and unveracious, he said, "Between truth and untruth there lies a penumbral zone which belongs equally to both, and I have often admired the adroitness with which Mr. Chamberlain sails within the half shadow, but sometimes I fear crosses the boundary on the wrong side."

HIS PARTNERS IN SCREW MONOPOLY.

A good deal used to be heard twenty years ago of the action by Messrs. Nettle fold, the screw makers with whom Mr. Chamberlain is associated in business, in securing a monopoly of the screw trade in the country. The fact is, I believe, that Messrs. Nettlefold secured the patents of certain screw-making machines which enabled them to command a practical monopoly in the business. They were able to produce screws better and cheaper than any of their competitors, and they are said to have used their advantage with a much greater regard for the iron laws of political economy than for the neighbourly consideration of live and let live. The story went that they did exactly what the American trusts of to-day do, what Armour of Chicago, for instance, is said to habitually practise in Illinois. If any rival presumes to sell any meat which Armour has not killed in a district which he has marked out for his own, he opens a rival shop in the village and sells meat at a loss until he has ruined his competitor. Then when he has the field to himself he goes back to the old prices. By similar means, it has often been asserted, Messrs. Nettlefold succeeded in· securing a monopoly of the screw trade in the United Kingdom. While this statement is frequently repeated, it is only fair to Mr. Chamberlain to quote what Rev. R. M. Grier of Rugeley wrote on the subject when Mr. H. R. Grenfell had attacked Mr. Chamberlain. Mr. Grier wrote:

Up to a recent period I believed the story so industriously circulated about the way in which Mr. Chamberlain realised his wealth, and when a friend of his challenged the truth of it I had no doubt that it could easily be verified. I was quickly, and I need hardly say agreeably, undeceived. Having made careful inquiries both of his friends and opponents in Birmingham, I could find no foundation whatever for the attacks which have been made upon him as a man of business. I had been given to understand that copies of a threatening circular to the small screw manufacturers, whom he is supposed to have deliberately ruined, were extant and could be produced. I could not discover one. His firm, I learned, had always stood

high among the people, and more especially the working men of Birmingham, for honesty and straightforward dealing, and all that could be truly said against it was that other firms had suffered indirectly through its success. This, I think, can hardly be imputed as blame to Mr. Chamberlain. For him, however, I hold no brief. His method of carrying on political controversy is not always to my taste, and I am the servant of a church to which he is not thought to bear any goodwill. I write in the interests of truth.

The best answer to these accusations is the fact that, in Birmingham and in the districts where Mr. Chamber

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