452
GEORGE LlCHTHEIM
THE LAST EDWARDIAN
ASQUITH: PORTRAIT OF A MAN AND AN ERA. By Roy
Jenkins.
cy.
mark Press. $7.95.
Edwardian Britain has vanished from sight, and with it
the
men and women who performed a last graceful cotillion on the edge
of
the European volcano, until the 'eruption of World War I brought
the
nineteenth century to a close. Historians (but not the author of the pres–
ent biography) have on occasion marked the analogy with the French
Revolution: the "guns of August" shattered a society which was still
in some sense aristocratic, though England-unlike the Continent-e–
caped revolution at the war's close. This was partly due to the rather
hollow military victory of 1918, which offered the governing class a
final respite; in part it reflected the enduring solidarity of a social
structure unconsciously designed
to
satisfy the aspirations of all classes.
The
ancien regime
had survived down to 1914. But it had survived
not by violence, as on the Continent, but thanks to an ingenious com·
promise between the governing class and the middle and working cla-.
Even the war did not shatter it completely, though the oligarchy
sub–
ordinated itself
to
the ex-radical Lloyd George
in
order to win. The
democratization of British society had to await the even greater test of
the period 1939-1945, when Churchill took Labour into partnership.
By
now the story is nearly ended. The oligarchy and its empire have
all
but vanished. Britain is on the point of becoming a democracy, ruled
by
Conservative and Labour politicians drawn from the same social stratum:
the lower middle class. In a few years it will become difficult to tell
the difference between a British Prime Minister and an Australian one.
The Edwardians belonged to an ampler and more self-confident
age. They had their final fling and got plenty of enjoyment out of it
Britannia ruled the waves. One quarter of the globe was painted red.
The pound sterling was unchallengeable. A word from the British Foreign
Secretary was enough to alter the world balance of power. At home,
Conservatives and Liberals quarreled over income
tax:
should it be one
shilling in the pound or less? (It is now nearer ten shillings, almost fifty
percent.) Should men and women over seventy, after a lifetime of toil,
be granted a weekly pension of five shillings (say one dollar at the
then current rate)? Lloyd George, aided by the Webbs, urged the measure
(anticipated by Bismarck in the eighteen eighties) and finally in 1908
