XIIITHE RE-EMERGENCE OF MR. LLOYD GEORGE
8.12.23
That muddle-headed process, the General Election, is over in Great Britain; the votes have been counted and the results are out—and everybody now is free to speculate what it was that the British Demos was trying to say to the world.
The idiotic simplicity of the voting method employed leaves the intelligent observer entirely free to put whatever interpretation he likes upon these results, and the British and foreign Press are taking the fullest advantage of this freedom. Confronted by a complex of issues and two or three usually very unpalatable candidates, the poor voter has voted anyhow or abstained from voting. Poor Demos might just as well have stayed away from the polls altogether for any chance he has had of expressing himself about France or about Russia or about the Singapore dockyards or anything of positive importance in the outer world. The single non-transferable vote system which prevails in the British communities and in America is almost as good a political gag as the old Russian autocracy, andmay in the end provoke as violent a reaction. One may conclude that a great number of women voters were scared by the thought of high prices under a Tariff, and that the Capital Levy is not the bogy it promised to be. We shall have no Tariff. Beyond that there are no clear indications of the Will of the People.
So instructed, Parliament reassembles.
The chief result of the convulsion is thatMr.Lloyd George is back in the middle of the limelight in his original rôle of a great Liberal leader. Gestures of reconciliation of an almost scandalous warmth have characterised all the chief Liberal gatherings, and it is a wonder to the rest of mankind that British Liberalism ever permitted even an appearance of dissension. AndMr.Lloyd George has completely and triumphantly come back. It is his victory as much as it is anybody’s victory.
Like nearly all Welshmen and many Englishmen, I have a strong but qualified affection forMr.Lloyd George. How far that affection is due toMr.Lloyd George’s own merits, and how far it is due to the endearing caricatures of Low, I will not attempt to determine. But we like his go and we like his bounce and we like his smile. Unless he is caught vociferating a speech, all his photographs, even the most casual snapshots, show him smiling the most disarming of smiles. All Englishmen, except perhaps the Duke of Northumberland, are radicals, subverters, equalitarians, and revolutionaries,though very many of us restrain and conceal these qualities, and in some they are altogether subconscious. (I say “Englishmen” here, and I do not add “Englishwomen.”) InMr.Lloyd George—particularly when he smiles or makes a peer—we recognise our dearest suppressions. His creations roused the elder peerage at last to open revolt, and that amused us. Were it not for him and the new newspaper adventurers of the last quarter-century, Britain would still be ruled by the Cecils and Society.
America, I suspect, feels much the same about him. In the United States they pick him out from among all other figures in British politics as theirs. He is much more in the American than the British tradition. Ever so many American statesmen began as provincial lawyers. The journey from that Welsh solicitor’s office to Whitehall is the nearest parallel British political life has yet given to the Log Cabin to White House adventure.
AndMr.Lloyd George has never had a classical education. He can quote Welsh but not Greek. A contempt for learning—that is to say, for classical learning—is another of the hidden things in the soul of every ordinary Englishman and every plain American. We know secretly that stuff is an imposture. But we never argue about it—even whenMr.President Coolidge betrays a belief that an ordinary classical education involves an understanding of human history. We know in our bones that it doesnot. It is not that we despise knowledge, but that we do not believe that a little Greek and Latin and a few worn quotations are knowledge. And on the wholeMr.Lloyd George is a very knowledgeable man.
In no sense of the word, of course, is he an educated man. Lincoln was. Starting from an almost illiterate adolescence, Lincoln, by an industrious self-education, achieved wisdom, achieved a profound and comprehensive perception of world realities; his mind could handle at last anything the mind of a President of men ever had to handle with supreme mastery. ButMr.Lloyd George has never built up a strong and comprehensive body of ideas in that fashion. He has never realised the need. His mind has not the solid substance of Lincoln’s mind. It is a quick feminine mind, with extremely rapid intuitions. His judgments are apt to be as just as they are quick, but he has never got them together into any system. They are immediate and superficial. He is mentally disconnected. He retains the prejudices and general ideas of his upbringing. He has no vision or sense of the world as a whole, no worked-out conception of the part he might play in the human story. So it was that opportunity caught him at Versailles and laid him bare.
Within two years of the signing of that treaty, for which he was mainly responsible, he had learnt better and was trying in his quite feminine indirect way to mitigate and undo it. He will go on trying.He means well—always. And he was almost the first statesman of the Coalition Government to realise the folly of an inveterate quarrel with New Russia. In dealing with Russia he will be unhampered by that violent anti-Bolshevik,Mr.Winston Churchill, who is again among the “outs.” His inconsistencies trouble the common British voter hardly at all. The logical Frenchman points to his broken pledges. This from the French point of view constitutes dishonesty. The Anglo-Saxon mind realises that to be honest one must be inconsistent. We have all made our mistakes, and muddled back out of them. Life is a puzzling thing full of surprises. The one thing the British will never understand is the tremendous persistence of M. Poincaré. It impresses them as invincible stupidity.
BothMr.Lloyd George andMr.Winston Churchill denounced Socialism, but whileMr.Churchill really meant Socialism by Socialism,Mr.Lloyd George only meant a tendency to vote for Labour instead of for Lloyd George. By nature and traditionMr.Lloyd George is on the Left side in politics, and his experience of Tories and rich men during the last few years has probably restored his leftward tendencies to their primitive vigour. As his record in the Ministry of Munitions shows, he has no respect for money: he throws it about, he can be careless and rough with it, it is a means to an end, and he has probably accumulated very little. Returned to power and faced by a spectacleof economic débacle, he is capable of taxing, levying upon, and confiscating the property of the rich to an extent that would makeMr.Henderson white with terror and throwMr.Ramsay MacDonald into convulsions of Scotch caution. (But mark you, it won’t be Socialism. He is against Socialism.)
SoMr.Lloyd George emerges again from his temporary eclipse seated on the back of a united Liberal Party and already leaning a little to the Left. As the world situation develops he will probably lean more and more to the Left. Until he leans right over the Socialist programme. He has with him the affectionate distrust of a great multitude of his countrymen. They like his smile, have a profound sympathy for his tendencies, and wish they knew more of his intentions. He is by far the most vigorous and popular personality in the new House. He may do anything. This election that has reunited the Liberal Party in his interest has cost the country over two million pounds. We trust him to give us a show for our money.