an before.]

[Footnote 220: W. Clarke, The Decline in English
Liberalism, in _Political Science Quarterly_,
Sept., 1901; P. Hamelle, Les elections anglaises,
in _Annales des Sciences Politiques_, Nov., 1900.]

After the elections dissension within the Liberal ranks broke out
afresh. The Rosebery wing maintained that, the South African war
having been begun, it was the duty of all Englishmen to support it,
and that the Unionist government should be attacked only on the ground
of mismanagement. In July, 1901, Campbell-Bannerman, impelled by the
weakness of his position, demanded of his fellow-partisans that they
either ratify or repudiate his leadership of the party in the (p. 155)
Commons. Approval was accorded, but no progress was realized toward an
agreement upon policies. To careful observers it became clear that
there could be no effective revival of Liberalism until the war in
South Africa should have been terminated and the larger imperial
problems involved in it solved. For a time the only clear-cut
parliamentary opposition offered the Government was that of the
frankly pro-Boer Nationalists.

V. THE LIBERAL REVIVAL

*163. The Issue of Tariff Reform.*--The rehabilitation of the Liberal
party came during the years 1902-1905. It was foreshadowed by the
famous Chesterfield speech of Lord Rosebery, delivered December 16,
1901, although the immediate effect of that effort was but to
accentuate party cleavages,[221] and it was made possible by a
reversion of the national mind from the war to domestic questions and
interests. More specifically, it was the product of opposition to the
Government's Education Act of 1902, of public disapproval of what
seemed to be the growing arrogance of the Unionist majority in the
House of Lords, and, above all, of the demoralization which was
wrought within the ranks of Unionism by the rise of the issue of
preferential tariffs. In a speech to his constituents at Birmingham,
May 15, 1903, Mr. Chamberlain, but lately returned from a visit to
South Africa and now at the height of his prestige, startled the
nation by declaring that the time had come for Great Britain to
abandon the free trade doctrines of the Manchester school and to knit
the Empire more closely together, and at the same time to promote the
economic interests of both the colonies and the mother country, by the
adoption of a system of pre