Chamberlain was the life and soul
of the opposition, and his criticisms had a vital influence upon the
attitude of the country when the House of Lords summarily threw out the
bill. His chief contribution to the discussions during the later stages
of the Gladstone and Rosebery ministries was in connexion with Mr
Asquith's abortive Employers' Liability Bill, when he foreshadowed the
method of dealing with this question afterwards carried out in the
Compensation Act of 1897. Outside parliament he was busy formulating
proposals for old age pensions, which had a prominent place in the
Unionist programme of 1895. In that year, on the defeat of Lord
Rosebery, the union of the Unionists was sealed by the inclusion of the
Liberal Unionist leaders in Lord Salisbury's ministry; and Mr
Chamberlain became secretary of state for the colonies. There had been
much speculation as to what his post would be, and his nomination to the
colonial office, then considered one of secondary rank, excited some
surprise; but Mr Chamberlain himself realized how important that
department had become. He carried with him into the ministry his close
Birmingham municipal associates, Mr Jesse Collings (as under secretary
of the home office), and Mr J. Powell-Williams (1840-1904) as financial
secretary to the war office. Mr Chamberlain's influence in the Unionist
cabinet was soon visible in the Workmen's Compensation Act and other
measures. This act, though in Sir Matthew White Ridley's charge as home
secretary, was universally and rightly associated with Mr Chamberlain;
and its passage, in the face of much interested opposition from
highly-placed, old-fashioned conservatives and capitalists on both
sides, was principally due to his determined advocacy. Another "social"
measure of less importance, which formed part of the Chamberlain
programme, was the Small Houses Acquisition Act of 1899; but the problem
of old age pensions was less easily solved. This subject had been handed
over in 1893 to a royal commission, and further discussed by a select
committee in 1899 and a departmental committee in 1900, but both of
these threw cold water on the schemes laid before them--a result which,
galling enough to one who had made so much play with the question in the
country, offered welcome material to his opponents for electioneering
recrimination, as year by year went by between 1895 and 1900 and nothing
resulted from all the confident talk on the subject in which Mr